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HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

No.  40 

Editors: 

HERBERT    FISHER,  M.A.,  F.B.A. 
Prof.  GILBERT  MURRAY,  Litt.D., 

LL.D.,  F.B.A. 
Prof.  J.  ARTHUR   THOMSON,  M.A. 
Prof.  WILLIAM  T.  BREWSTER,  M.A. 


THE  HOME  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY. 
OF  MODERN  KNOWLEDGE 

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LITERATURE  AND  ART 

Already  Published 

SHAKESPEARE By  John  Masefield 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE- 
MODERN  By  G.  H.  Mai« 

LANDMARKS  IN  FRENCH 
LITERATURE By  G.  L.  Strachey 

ARCHITECTURE By  W.  R.  Lethabt 

ENGLISH  LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL  By  W.  P.  Ker 

THE   ENGLISH    LANGUAGE  .   .  By  L.  Peabsall  Shitk 

Future  Issues 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  AMERICA  By  W.  P.  Trent  and  John 

Ekskink 
THE  WRITING   OF  ENGLISH  .   By  W.  T.  Brewstkh 
ITALIAN  ART  OF  THE  RENAIS- 
SANCE    By  RoGES  E.  Fkt 

GREAT  WRITERS  OF  RUSSIA  .  By  C.  T.  Hagbebt  Wbight 
ANCIENT  ART  AND  RITUAL  .  By  Miss  Jane  Habbisok 
THE  RENAISSANCE By  Mrs.  R.  A  Taylor 


THE 
ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 


BY 

LOGAN   PEARSALL  SMITH,  M.A. 

AUTHOR  OF 
**  LIFE  AND  LETTERS  OF  SIR  HENRY  WOTTON,"  ETC. 


NEW  YORK 

HENRY  HOLT  AND   COMPANY 

LONDON 

WILLIAMS   AND   NORGATE 


COPTKICBT,  I9IX, 
BT 

HENRY    HOLT  AND   COMPANr 


THE  UNIVBRSITY   PRESS,   CAUBRIDGB,    U.S.A. 


College 
library 

P£ 
I  07S 

CONTENTS 

OHAP.  PAOB 

I    The  Origins  of  the  Ekglish  Lakguaoe    .    .  7 

II     FoBEioN  Elements 30 

III  Modern  English 62 

IV  Word-Maxing  in  English 81 

V    Makers  of  English  Words 109 

VI    Language  AND  History — the  Earliest  Period  126 
VII     Language  and  History  —  the  Dark  and  the 

Middle  Ages 152 

VIII     Language  and  History —  the  Modern  Period  188 

IX    Language  and  Thought 214 

Bibliography 253 

Index 255 


'^3636 


THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

CHAPTER  I 

THE  ORIGINS  OP  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Among  the  many  living  forms  of  human 

speech,   and   those   countless   others   which 

have  arisen  and  perished  in  the  past,  the 

Enghsh   language,    which   has   now   spread 

over  so  large  a  portion  of  the  world,  is  as 

humble  and  obscure  in  its  origin  as  any  other. 

It  is,  of  course,  in  no  sense  native  to  England, 

but   was  brought   thither   by   the   German 

tribes  who  conquered  the  island  in  the  Vth 

and  Vlth  Centuries;  and  its  nearest  relations 

are  to  be  found  among  the  humble  dialects 

of  a  few  barren  islands  on  the  German  coast. 

When  our  Anglo-Saxon  ancestors  came  first 

to  ravage  Britain,  and  finally  to  settle  there, 

they  found  the  island  inhabited  by  a  people 

weaker,  indeed,  but  infinitely  more  civilized 

than  themselves.    For  several  centuries  the 
7 


8  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Celts  in  England  had  enjoyed  the  benefits 
of  Roman  government,  and  shared  in  the 
civilization  of  the  Roman  Empire;  they  lived 
in  walled  cities,  worshipped  in  Christian 
churches,  and  spoke  to  a  certain  extent,  at 
least,  the  Latin  language;  and  it  is  possible, 
if  this  Teutonic  invasion  had  never  happened, 
that  the  inhabitants  of  England  would  be 
now  speaking  a  language  descended  from 
Latin,  like  French  or  Spanish  or  Italian.  It 
is  true  that  EngUsh  has  become  almost  a 
half-sister  to  these  "Romance  languages,*' 
as  they  are  called,  and  a  large  part  of  its 
vocabulary  is  derived  from  Latin  sources; 
but  this  is  not  in  any  way  due  to  the  Roman 
conquest  of  Britain,  but  to  later  causes.  In 
whatever  parts  of  Britain  the  Teutonic  tribes 
settled,  the  Roman  civilization  and  the 
Roman  language  perished;  and  we  find  at 
first  a  purely  Germanic  race,  a  group  of  related 
tribes,  speaking  dialects  of  what  was  sub- 
stantially the  same  language — the  language 
which  is  the  parent  of  our  present  English 
speech.  This  Anglo-Saxon  or  (as  it  is  now 
preferably  called)  "Old  English"  language 
belonged  to  the  great  Teutonic  family  of 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    9 

speech,  which  in  its  turn  was  separated  into 
three  main  famihes — East  Germanic,  now 
extinct;  Scandinavian,  or  old  Norse,  from 
which  Icelandic,  Danish,  and  Swedish  are 
descended;  and  West  Germanic,  from  which 
are  derived  the  two  great  branches  of  High 
and  Low  German.  High  German  has  become 
the  modern  literary  German;  while  Low 
German  has  split  up  into  a  number  of  differ- 
ent languages — Frisian,  Dutch,  and  Flemish. 
It  is  to  the  last  of  these  groups  that  English 
belongs,  and  its  nearest  relatives  are  the 
Frisian  dialect,  Dutch,  and  Flemish. 

But  the  Teutonic  tongues  themselves  form 
one  branch  of  another  great  family,  the 
Aryan  or  Indo-European,  which  is  spread 
from  India  in  the  East  to  Ireland  in  the 
West,  and  includes  Sanskrit,  Persian,  Greek, 
Latin,  Celtic,  and  several  other  languages. 
The  grammatical  structure  of  English  and 
German,  and  a  large  element  of  their  vocabu- 
laries, proves  their  relationship  to  these  other 
tongues,  though  in  the  course  of  their  wander- 
ings from  their  primitive  home,  forms  were 
changed  or  dropped,  the  pronunciation  of 
some  of  the  vowels  and  consonants  shifted. 


10         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

many  old  words  perished,  and  many  new 
ones  were  acquired.  The  study  of  the  rela- 
tionships between  these  various  languages 
forms  the  subject  of  the  science  of  Compara- 
tive Philology,  a  science  almost  entirely 
based  in  its  turn  on  what  is  called  "Phonol- 
ogy," the  study  of  changes  in  sound,  and  the 
elaborate  laws  by  which  they  are  governed. 
It  is  only,  indeed,  since  the  discovery  of  these 
laws  that  the  science  of  language  or  "lin- 
guistics" has  become  possible,  and  it  is  on  the 
careful  and  accurate  study  of  sound-changes 
that  is  founded  the  modern  historical  con- 
ception of  English,  its  relationship  to  other 
languages,  and  its  development  from  the 
early  speech  of  our  Anglo-Saxon  ancestors. 

This  early  speech  was,  as  we  have  seen, 
a  Teutonic  or  German  language.  Although 
our  modem  English  has  been  derived  from  it 
by  a  regular  process  of  change,  it  was  in  its 
character  more  like  modem  Dutch  or  modem 
German.  Its  vocabulary  was  what  is  now 
called  a  "pure"  one,  containing  few  foreign 
words,  and  its  grammar  was  even  more  com- 
plicated than  that  of  modern  German.  It 
retained  the  elaborate  system  of  genders;  its 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    11 

nouns  were  mascuKne,  feminine,  or  neuter; 
they  had  five  eases  and  various  declensions, 
and  the  adjectives,  as  in  German,  agreed  with 
the  nouns,  and  were  dechned  with  them;  and 
in  the  conjugation  of  the  verbs  there  were 
twice  as  many  forms  as  in  modern  English. 
It  was,  therefore,  like  Latin  and  Greek  and 
German,  an  inflected  langu,a,ge;  while  in 
modern  English  inflections  have  almost  dis- 
appeared, and  other  means  of  expressing 
grammatical  relations  have  been  devised. 

As  this  loss  of  inflections  is  one  of  the  main 
characteristics  of  modern  English,  and  illus- 
trates a  tendency  of  language  which  has  been 
carried  further  in  English  than  in  any  other 
form  of  European  speech,  it  will  be  well, 
perhaps,  to  say  a  few  more  words  about  it. 
To  the  older  philologists,  when  the  change  of 
language,  from  the  earliest  tongues  down  to 
the  present  day,  was  at  last  unfolded  before 
their  eyes,  the  long  and  uninterrupted  history 
of  grammatical  losses  which  they  found,  the 
perishing  of  one  nice  distinction  after  another, 
seemed  to  them  an  uninterrupted  process  of 
ruin  and  degeneration.  But  this  view  of  the 
history  of  language — a  continuous  advance. 


12         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

namely,  in  richness  and  accuracy  of  expres- 
sion, accompanied  and  produced  by  a  con- 
tinual process  of  decay — is  too  paradoxical 
to  be  maintained,  and  it  is  coming  to  be 
realized  more  and  more  that  the  disappear- 
ance of  grammatical  forms  is  not  a  loss,  but 
a  gain;  and  that  they  have  been  superseded 
by  a  means  of  expression  which  renders  them 
more  or  less  superfluous,  and  is  itself  vastly 
more  expressive  and  convenient.  This  means 
of  expression  is  called  "analysis,"  and  con- 
sists in  stating  the  relations  once  expressed 
by  verbal  terminations  by  separate  words 
of  an  abstract  character;  by  prepositions  for 
the  cases  of  nouns,  and  by  auxiliaries  for  the 
tenses  of  the  verbs.  If  we  look  in  a  Latin 
grammar  we  shall  find,  for  instance,  that  to 
translate  one  Latin  word,  fuissemy  four  words, 
"I  should  have  been,"  are  used  in  English; 
that  is  to  say,  the  dififerent  notions  combined 
by  inflection  in  one  Latin  word  are  taken 
out  from  the  conglomerate  whole  by  analysis, 
and  are  expressed  each  of  them  by  a  separate 
word. 

The  development  of  analysis  in  language, 
the  habit  of  using  a  separate  word  for  the 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    13 

expression  of  each  separate  element  in  a 
complex  notion,  is  one  that  we  can  trace 
throughout  the  whole  history  of  language. 
In  primitive  forms  of  speech  whole  complexes 
of  thought  and  feehng  are  expressed  in  single 
terms.  "I  said  it  to  him*'  is  one  word, 
"I  said  it  to  her"  another;  "my  head"  is 
a  single  term,  "his  head"  a  different  one. 
My  head  is,  of  course,  to  me  an  enormously 
different  thing  from  his  head,  and  it  is  an 
immense  advance  in  the  clearness  of  thought 
when  I  analyse  the  thought  of  "my  head" 
into  its  different  parts,  one  of  which  is  peculiar 
to  me,  and  named  "mine,"  the  other  that  of 
"head,"  which  I  share  with  other  human 
beings.  Simphcity  of  language  is,  in  fact, 
like  other  kinds  of  simplicity,  a  product  of 
high  civilization,  not  a  primitive  condition; 
and  the  advance  of  analysis,  the  creation  of 
words  expressing  abstract  relations,  is  one  of 
the  most  remarkable  triumphs  of  the  human 
intellect.  This  development  of  analysis  had 
already,  of  course,  reached  a  high  point  in 
languages  like  Greek,  Latin,  and  Anglo- 
Saxon;  but  it  has  been  carried  even  further 
in  modern  forms  of  speech,  and  reaches  in 


14  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Europe,  at  least,  its  furthest  limit  in  modem 
English.  We  see  it,  in  the  first  place,  in  the 
greatly  increased  use  of  prepositions,  of,  and 
tOy  and  foTy  and  hy^  and  still  more  in  the  use 
of  the  auxiliary  verbs  have,  and  do,  and  shally 
and  willy  and  he,  by  means  of  which  we  are 
now  able  to  express  almost  every  shade  of 
thought  which  was  formerly  rendered  by 
changes  in  the  form  of  the  verb. 

Along  with  this  creation  of  new  grammati- 
cal machinery,  modern  English  is  remarkable 
for  the  way  in  which  other  superfluous  forms 
and  imnecessary  terminations  have  been  dis- 
carded. In  the  first  place,  we  must  note  the 
loss  in  English  of  grammatical  gender.  The 
absence  of  this  in  English  is  more  extraor- 
dinary than  we  always  realize.  For  this 
irrational  distinction,  which  corresponds  to 
no  distinction  in  thought,  and  capriciously 
attributes  sex  to  sexless  objects,  and  often 
the  wrong  gender  to  living  beings,  is  yet 
found,  as  a  survival  of  barbarism  and  a  use- 
less burden  to  the  memory,  in  all  the  other 
well-known  languages  of  Europe.  With  the 
loss  of  gender  we  have  also  discarded  the 
agreement  of  adjectives,  of  possessive  pro- 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    15 

nouns  and  the  article,  with  their  nouns.  An 
Englishman  can  say,  for  instance,  "my  wife 
and  children"  while  the  Frenchman  must 
repeat  the  possessive  pronoun,  as  in  mafemme 
et  mes  enfants.  If  we  regard  it  as  the  triumph 
of  culture  to  fit  means  perfectly  to  ends,  and 
to  do  the  most  with  the  greatest  economy 
of  means,  we  must  consider  this  discarding 
of  the  superfluous  as  a  great  gain  in  modern 
English. 

Another  great  characteristic  of  modern 
English,  as  of  other  modern  languages,  is  the 
use  of  word-order  as  a  means  of  grammatical 
expression.  If  in  an  English  sentence,  such 
as  "The  wolf  ate  the  lamb,"  we  transpose  the 
positions  of  the  nouns,  we  entirely  change  the 
meaning  of  the  sentence;  the  subject  and 
object  are  not  denoted  by  any  terminations 
to  the  words,  as  they  would  be  in  Greek  or 
Latin  or  in  modern  German,  but  by  their 
position  before  or  after  the  verb.  This  is 
one  of  the  last  developments  of  speech,  a 
means  of  expression  unknown  to  the  rich  and 
beautiful  languages  of  antiquity.  This  tend- 
ency to  a  fixed  word-order  was  more  or  less 
established  in  Early  English,  as  it  is  in  modern 


16         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

German,  in  spite  of  the  richness  of  inflections 
in  these  languages;  and  it  is  a  debatable 
point  whether  the  decay  of  inflections  made 
it  necessary,  or  its  establishment  made  the 
inflections  superfluous,  and  so  brought  about 
their  decay.  Probably  each  acted  on  the 
other;  as  the  inflections  faded,  a  fixed  word- 
order  became  more  important,  and  the  estab- 
lishment of  this  order  caused  the  inflections 
to  be  more  and  more  forgotten. 

How  is  it,  then,  that  these  amazing  changes, 
this  loss  of  genders,  this  extraordinary  simpli- 
fication, have  happened  in  our  English  speech? 
For  five  hundred  years  after  the  invasion  of 
England,  the  language  of  our  Anglo-Saxon 
ancestors  remained,  as  far  as  we  can  judge, 
practically  unchanged.  Then  a  transforma- 
tion began,  and  in  three  or  four  centuries 
what  is  practically  a  new  language  somewhat 
suddenly  appears.  In  the  first  place,  as  an 
answer  to  this  question,  is  the  fact  that 
simplification  is  the  law  of  development  in 
all  languages,  and  has  influenced  more  or  less 
all  European  forms  of  speech.  At  the  time 
that  English  changed,  the  other  languages 
of  Europe  were   changing   too.     That   this 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    17 

process  was  carried  further,  and  proceeded 
faster  in  England  than  elsewhere  is  not, 
however,  due  to  any  special  enlightenment  or 
advance  of  civilization  in  the  English  nation. 
For,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  education,  culture, 
and  enlightenment,  although  they  help  prog- 
ress in  other  ways,  are  intensely  conservative 
in  matters  of  speech;  and  while  for  their 
own  purposes  the  educated  classes  have  to 
connive  at  changes  in  vocabulary,  any  gram- 
matical advance  is  opposed  by  them  with 
all  the  powers  they  possess.  We  know  how 
intensely  repugnant  to  them  are  any  propo- 
sals for  the  reform  of  our  absurd  and  illogical 
system  of  spelling,  and  we  can  imagine  the 
outcry  that  would  arise,  should  any  one  dare 
to  suggest  the  slightest  and  most  advanta- 
geous simplification  in  English  grammar.  In 
our  plurals  these  and  those,  for  instance,  we 
retain,  as  Dr.  Sweet  has  pointed  out,  two 
quite  useless  and  illogical  survivals  of  the  old 
concord  of  attribute-words  with  their  nouns. 
For  if  we  do  not  change  our  adjectives  or 
possessive  pronouns  for  the  plural,  and  say 
his  hat  and  his  hats,  why  should  we  change 
this  and  that  into  these  and  those  in  the  same 


18  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

positions?  And  yet  the  whole  force  of  educa- 
tion and  culture  would  furiously  oppose  the 
dropping  of  these  superfluous  words,  if,  in- 
deed, they  could  be  brought  to  consider  any 
such  proposal.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  prog- 
ress in  Enghsh  is  due  not  to  the  increase  of 
education,  but  to  its  practical  disappearance 
among  those  who  used  the  national  speech.  It 
is  the  result,  not  of  national  prosperity,  but  of 
two  national  disasters — the  Danish  invasion 
and  the  Norman  Conquest. 

The  first  district  of  England  to  attain  any 
high  degree  of  civilization,  according  to  the 
standards  of  that  time,  was  the  north,  where 
Christianity  and  culture  were  introduced  from 
Ireland,  where  literature  and  scholarship 
flourished,  and  where  the  local  or  North- 
umbrian dialect  seemed  likely  to  become  the 
standard  speech  of  England.  It  was,  indeed, 
from  the  Angles  settled  here  and  their  Anglian 
dialect,  that  our  language  acquired  the  name 
of  "English,"  which  it  has  ever  since  retained. 
This  Northumbrian  civilization,  however,  was 
almost  utterly  destroyed  in  the  Vlllth  and 
IXth  Centuries  by  a  new  invasion  of  pagan 
tribes  from  across  the  German  Ocean.    The 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    19 

Danes,  who  now  came  like  the  Angles  and 
Saxons,  first  to  harry  England  and  then  to 
settle  there,  were  near  relatives  of  the  inhabit- 
ants they  conquered,  and  came  from  a  dis- 
trict not  far  from  the  original  home  of  the 
earlier  invaders.  Their  language  was  so  like 
Anglo-Saxon  that  it  could  be  understood  with- 
out great  diflSculty;  so  when  the  two  races 
were  settled  side  by  side,  and  when  before 
long  they  became  amalgamated,  it  was  natural 
that  mixed  dialects  should  arise,  mainly 
EngKsh  in  character,  but  with  many  Danish 
words,  and  with  many  differing  grammatical 
forms  confused  and  blurred.  As  there  was 
no  literature  nor  any  literary  class  to  preserve 
the  old  language,  the  rise  of  these  mixed 
dialects  would  be  unchecked,  and  we  can 
safely  attribute  to  this  settlement  of  the 
Danes  a  great  influence  on  the  change  in 
the  English  language.  It  is  in  the  districts 
where  the  Danes  were  settled  that  the  English 
language  became  first  simplified,  so  that  in 
the  process  of  development  their  speech  was 
at  least  two  centuries  ahead  of  that  of  the 
south  of  England.  But  this  effect  was  only 
local,  and  did  not  at  first  affect  the  language 


20  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

as  a  whole.  When  the  Northumbrian  culture 
was  destroyed,  the  kingdom  of  Wessex  be- 
came the  centre  of  English  civiUzation;  and 
under  the  scholarly  influence  of  King  Alfred, 
and  the  revival  of  learning  he  promoted, 
West-Saxon  became  the  Hterary  and  classical 
form  of  English,  and  almost  all  the  specimens 
of  Early  English  that  have  been  preserved  are 
written  in  this  dialect.  Classical  Anglo- 
Saxon,  therefore,  with  its  genders  and  its  rich 
inflectional  forms,  was  not  affected  by  the 
Danish  invasion;  and  had  it  suffered  from  no 
further  disaster,  English  would  probably  have 
developed  much  as  the  other  Low  German 
forms  have  developed,  and  we  should  be  now 
speaking  a  language  not  unlike  modern  Dutch. 
But  for  the  third  time  a  foreign  race  invaded 
England,  and  the  language  of  Wessex,  like 
that  of  Northumbria,  was  in  its  turn  almost 
destroyed.  The  effect,  however,  of  the  Nor- 
man Conquest,  although  quite  as  far-reaching, 
was  more  indirect  than  that  of  the  Danish. 
The  Normans  did  not,  like  the  Danes,  break 
up  or  confuse  Anglo-Saxon  by  direct  conflict; 
but  their  domination,  by  interrupting  the 
tradition  of  the  language,  by  destroying  its 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    21 

literature  and  culture,  by  reducing  to  it  the 
speech  of  uneducated  peasants,  simply  re- 
moved the  conservative  influence  of  educa- 
tion, and  allowed  the  forces  which  had  been 
long  at  work  to  act  unchecked;  and  Enghsh, 
being  no  longer  spoken  by  the  cultivated 
classes  or  taught  in  the  schools,  developed 
as  a  popular  spoken  language  with  great 
rapidity. 

Each  man  wrote,  as  far  as  he  wrote  at  all, 
in  the  dialect  he  spoke;  phonetic  changes  that 
had  appeared  in  speech  were  now  recorded 
in  writing;  these  changes,  by  levelling  ter- 
minations, produced  confusion,  and  that  con- 
fusion led  to  instinctive  search  for  new  means 
of  expression;  word-order  became  more  fixed; 
the  use  of  prepositions  and  auxiliary  verbs 
to  express  the  meanings  of  lost  inflections 
increased,  and  the  greater  unity  of  England 
under  the  Norman  rule  helped  in  the  diffusion 
of  the  advanced  and  simplified  forms  of  the 
north.  We  even  find,  what  is  a  very  rare 
thing  in  the  history  of  grammar,  that  some 
foreign  pronouns  were  actually  adopted  from 
another  language — namely,  the  Danish  words 
she,  they,  them,  their,  which  had  replaced  the 


22  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Anglo-Saxon  forms  in  the  north,  and  were 
gradually  adopted  into  the  common  speech. 
From  the  north,  too,  spread  the  use  of  the 
genitive  and  plural  in  s  for  nearly  all  nouns, 
and  not  only  for  those  of  one  declension. 

Although  the  development  of  English  was 
gradual,  and  there  is  at  no  period  a  definite 
break  in  its  continuity,  it  may  be  said  to 
present  three  main  periods  of  development — 
the  Old,  the  Middle,  and  the  Modern,  which 
may  be  distinguished  by  their  grammatical 
characteristics.  These  have  been  defined  by 
Dr.  Sweet  as  first,  the  period  of  full  inflections, 
which  may  be  said  to  last  down  to  a.d.  1200; 
the  period  of  Middle  EngHsh,  of  levelled 
inflections,  from  1200  to  1500;  and  that  of 
Modern  EngHsh,  or  lost  inflections,  from 
1500  to  the  present  time. 

Although  the  grammar  of  the  language 
by  the  end  of  the  Middle  English  period  was 
fixed  in  its  main  outlines,  there  has,  never- 
theless, been  some  change  and  development 
since  that  time.  Thus  the  northern  are  for 
be,  spread  southwards  in  the  early  part  of  the 
XVIth  Century,  and  became  current  towards 
its  end,  where  it  appears  in  Shakespeare  and 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    23 

the  Authorized  Version  of  the  Bible,  and  it 
has  now  in  modern  times  almost  supplanted 
the  southern  be  in  the  subjunctive  mood. 
The  use  of  auxiliary  verbs  to  express  various 
shades  of  meaning,  although  it  had  begun  in 
the  Old,  and  developed  in  the  Middle  EngHsh 
period,  has  been  greatly  extended  in  modern 
times.  The  distinction  in  meaning  between 
/  write  and  /  am  writing,  between  the  habitual 
and  the  actual  present,  is  a  modern  innova- 
tion; and  another  modern  development  which 
expresses  a  useful  shade  of  meaning  is  that  of 
the  emphatic  present  with  the  auxiliary  do, 
"I  do  think,"  "I  do  beheve,"  as  contrasted 
with  the  less  emphatic  "I  think,"  "I  be- 
heve." Both  forms  existed  in  Old  English, 
but  until  the  XVIIth  Century  no  clear  dis- 
tinction was  made  between  them,  as  we  see 
in  the  bibhcal  phrase  "and  they  did  eat  and 
were  all  filled."  The  XVIIth  Century  saw 
also  the  adoption  of  the  neuter  possessive 
pronoun  its,  which  is  first  found  in  1598,  but 
which  is  not  used  in  the  Bible  of  1611,  nor  in 
any  of  Shakespeare's  plays  printed  in  his  life- 
time. The  use  of  nouns  as  adjectives,  the  "  at- 
tributive noun,"  as  it  is  called,  as  in  "garden 


d4         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

flowers,"  "railway  train,"  etc.,  is  a  new  and 
most  useful  innovation,  which  has  come  into 
use  since  the  period  of  Old  EngHsh,  and  has 
been  greatly  developed  in  modem  times. 
There  is  nothing  quite  like  it  in  any  other 
language  except  Chinese,  and  it  is  a  great 
step  in  advance  towards  that  ideal  language 
in  which  meaning  is  expressed,  not  by  ter- 
minations, but  by  the  simple  method  of  word 
position.  And  following  also  this  line  of 
development  we  find  a  curious  case  in  modem 
EngKsh  when  the  termination  used  for  in- 
flection, the  s  of  the  EngUsh  genitive,  has 
become  detached  from  its  noun  and  used 
almost  as  a  separate  word.  This  is  the  group 
genitive,  as  in  "the  King  of  England's  son," 
instead  of  "the  King's  son  of  England," and  in 
colloquial  speech  we  can  even  use  a  phrase 
such  as  "the  man  I  saw  yesterday's  hat." 
Here  the  s  of  the  genitive  has  become  de- 
tached from  its  noun,  and  made  into  a  sign 
with  the  abstract  character  of  a  mathematical 
symbol.  One  of  the  most  modern  develop- 
ments of  English  granmiar,  which  dates  from 
the  end  of  the  XVIIIth  Century,  is  a  new 
imperfect  passive,   as  in   the  phrase   "the 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    25 

house  is  being  built,"  for  the  older   "the 
house  is  building,"  or  "is  a-building." 

These  modern  instances  will  prove  that 
the  development  of  grammar  is  not  a  matter 
entirely  depending,  as  has  sometimes  been 
thought,  upon  historical  causes,  or  upon 
phonetic  change.  Historical  accidents,  and 
the  decay  of  terminations,  no  doubt  help  in 
the  creation  of  new  forms,  but  are  not  them- 
selves the  cause  of  their  creation.  Behind 
all  the  phenomena  of  changing  form  we  are 
aware  of  the  action  of  a  purpose,  an  intelli- 
gence, incessantly  modifying  and  making 
use  of  this  decadence  of  sound,  this  wear  and 
tear  of  inflections,  and  patiently  forging  for 
itself,  out  of  the  debris  of  grammatical  ruin, 
new  instruments  for  a  more  subtle  analysis 
of  thought,  and  a  more  delicate  expression 
of  every  shade  of  meaning.  It  is  an  intelli- 
gence which  takes  advantage  of  the  smallest 
accidents  to  provide  itself  with  new  resources; 
and  it  is  only  when  we  analyse  and  study  the 
history  of  some  new  grammatical  contrivance 
that  we  become  aware  of  the  long  and  patient 
labour  which  has  been  required  to  embody 
in  a  new  and  convenient  form  a  long  train  of 


M         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

reasoning.  And  yet  we  only  know  this  force 
by  its  workings;  it  is  not  a  conscious  or  de- 
Kberate,  but  a  corporate  will,  an  instinctive 
sense  of  what  the  people  wish  their  language 
to  be;  and  although  we  cannot  predict  its 
actions,  yet,  when  we  examine  its  results, 
we  cannot  but  believe  that  thought  and  in- 
telHgent  purpose  have  produced  them.  This 
corporate  will  is,  indeed,  like  other  human 
manifestations,  often  capricious  in  its  work- 
ing, and  not  all  its  results  are  worthy  of 
approval.  It  sometimes  blurs  useful  distinc- 
tions, preserves  others  that  are  unnecessary, 
allows  admirable  tools  to  drop  from  its  hands; 
its  methods  are  often  illogical  and  childish, 
in  some  ways  it  is  unduly  and  obstinately 
conservative,  while  it  allows  of  harmful  in- 
novations in  other  directions.  Yet,  on  the 
whole,  its  results  are  beyond  all  praise;  it 
has  provided  an  instrument  for  the  expres- 
sion, not  only  of  thought,  but  of  feeUng  and 
imagination,  fitted  for  all  the  needs  of  man, 
and  far  beyond  anything  that  could  ever  have 
been  devised  by  the  dehberation  of  the 
wisest  and  most  learned  experts. 
When  the  early  physicists  became  aware 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    27 

of  forces  they  could  not  understand,  they 
tried  to  escape  their  difficulty  by  personifying 
the  laws  of  nature  and  inventing  "spirits" 
that  controlled  material  phenomena.  The 
student  of  language,  in  the  presence  of  the 
mysterious  power  which  creates  and  changes 
language,  has  been  compelled  to  adopt  this 
medieval  procedure,  and  has  vaguely  defined, 
by  the  name  of  "the  Genius  of  the  Language," 
the  power  that  guides  and  controls  its  progress. 
If  we  ask  ourselves  who  are  the  ministers  of 
this  power,  and  whence  its  decrees  derive 
their  binding  force,  we  cannot  find  any 
definite  answer  to  our  question.  It  is  not  the 
grammarians  or  philologists  who  form  or  carry 
out  its  decisions;  for  the  philologists  disclaim 
all  responsibiKty,  and  the  schoolmasters  and 
grammarians  generally  oppose,  and  fight  bit- 
terly, but  in  vain,  against  the  new  develop- 
ments. We  can,  perhaps,  find  its  nearest 
analogy  in  what,  among  social  insects,  we 
call,  for  lack  of  a  more  scientific  name,  "the 
Spirit  of  the  Hive."  This  "spirit,"  in 
societies  of  bees,  is  supposed  to  direct  their 
labours  on  a  fixed  plan,  with  intelHgent  con- 
sideration of  needs  and   opportunities;   and 


d8         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

although  proceeding  from  no  fixed  authority, 
it  is  yet  operative  in  each  member  of  the 
community.  And  so  in  each  one  of  us  the 
Genius  of  the  Language  finds  an  instrument 
for  the  carrying  out  of  its  decrees.  We  each 
of  us  possess,  in  a  greater  or  less  degree,  what 
the  Germans  call  "speech-feeling,"  a  sense  of 
what  is  worthy  of  adoption  and  what  should 
be  avoided  and  condemned.  This  in  almost 
all  of  us  is  an  instinctive  process;  we  feel  the 
advantages  or  disadvantages  of  new  forms 
and  new  distinctions,  although  we  should 
be  hard  put  to  it  to  give  a  reason  for  our 
feehng.  We  know,  for  instance,  that  it  is 
now  wrong  to  say  "much"  rather  than 
"many  thanks,"  though  Shakespeare  used 
the  phrase;  that  "much  happier"  is  right, 
though  the  old  "much  happy"  is  wrong, 
and  that  very  must  in  many  cases  take  the 
place  once  occupied  by  much.  We  say  a 
picture  was  hung,  but  a  murderer  was  hanged, 
often,  perhaps,  without  being  conscious  that 
we  make  the  distinction;  and  we  all  of  us, 
probably,  observe  the  modem  and  subtle 
difference  between  home  and  horn,  the  two 
past  participles  of  the  verb  to  hear,  as  when 


ORIGINS  OF  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE    29 

we  write  *^  borne  by  a  slave  mother,"  but 
''born  of  a  slave,"  although  few  of  us  realize 
the  subtle  distinction  between  actual  bringing 
forth,  and  the  more  general  notion  of  coming 
into  existence,  on  which  this  difference  is 
based. 

One  of  the  most  elaborate  and  wonderful 
achievements  of  the  Genius  of  the  Language 
in  modern  times  is  the  differentiation  of  the 
uses  of  shall  and  will,  a  distinction  not  ob- 
served in  Shakespeare  and  the  Bible,  and  so 
complicated  that  it  can  hardly  be  mastered  by 
those  born  in  parts  of  the  British  Islands  in 
which  it  has  not  yet  been  established. 

Grammarians  can  help  this  corporate  will 
by  registering  its  decrees  and  extending  its 
analogies;  but  they  fight  against  it  in  vain. 
They  were  not  able  to  banish  the  imperfect 
passive  "the  house  is  being  built,"  which 
some  of  them  declared  was  an  outrage  on 
the  language;  the  phrase  "different  to"  has 
been  used  by  most  good  authors  in  spite  of 
their  protests;  and  if  the  Genius  of  the  Lan- 
guage finds  the  split  infinitive  useful  to  ex- 
press certain  shades  of  thought,  we  can  safely 
guess  that  all  opposition  to  it  will  be  futile. 


80         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Better  guides  are  to  be  found  in  our  great 
writers,  in  whom  this  sense  of  language  is 
highly  developed;  and  it  is  in  them,  if  in  any 
one,  that  this  power  finds  its  most  eflScient 
ministers.  But  even  they  can  only  select  pop- 
ular forms,  or  at  the  most  suggest  new  ones ; 
but  the  adoption  or  rejection  of  these  dep>ends 
on  the  enactments  of  the  popular  will,  whose 
decrees,  carried  in  no  legislature,  and  subject 
to  no  veto,  are  final  and  without  appeal. 


CHAPTER  II 

FOREIGN  ELEMENTS 

If  the  Norman  Conquest  had  but  an  in- 
direct influence  on  the  development  of  English 
grammar,  on  the  other  part  of  the  language, 
the  vocabulary,  its  effect  was  so  great  as 
almost  to  transform  the  character  of  our 
speech.  Old  English  contained  but  a  small 
proportion  of  borrowed  words;  but  when  it 
ceased  to  be  a  literary  language,  and  almost 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  31 

all  its  learned  compounds  perished,  their  place 
was  gradually  taken  by  words  borrowed  from 
the  French  speech  of  the  Norman  invaders. 
The  character  of  the  words  now  borrowed, 
the  objects  and  ideas  they  denoted,  are  full 
of  significance  for  our  early  history,  and  they 
will  be  treated  from  this  point  of  view  in  a 
later  chapter.  We  are  now  concerned,  how- 
ever, for  the  present,  more  with  their  formal 
aspect — their  shapes,  the  sources  whence  they 
were  derived,  and  the  transformations  they 
had  undergone  before  they  reached  us.  The 
conquest  of  England  by  the  Normans  was  the 
third  invasion  of  this  island  by  a  Teutonic 
race  from  countries  across  the  German  Sea; 
for  the  Normans  were  closely  related  both 
to  the  Anglo-Saxons  and  to  their  subsequent 
Danish  conquerors,  and  originally  they  spoke 
a  language  allied  to  the  Anglo-Saxon.  But 
they  had  travelled  far,  and  acquired  much, 
since  they  had  left  their  remote  Scandinavian 
birthplace.  For  150  years  before  they  came 
to  England  they  had  been  settled  in  Nor- 
mandy, where  they  had  lost  almost  all  mem- 
ory of  their  original  speech,  and  had  adopted 
a  new  religion,  a  new  system  of  law  and 


8«         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

society,  new  thoughts  and  new  nianners. 
They  therefore  came  practically  as  French- 
men to  their  English  and  Danish  cousins;  and 
it  was  the  speech  of  France,  the  civilization  of 
France  that  they  brought  with  them.  But 
the  speech  of  France  was  a  very  different 
language  from  Modern  French  as  we  know  it; 
indeed,  there  was  not,  at  this  time,  any  recog- 
nized and  classical  French,  but  only  a  number 
of  dialects,  among  which  that  of  Normandy 
was  the  one  which  was  first  introduced  into 
England.  These  French  dialects  were  de- 
scended from  the  popular  and  colloquial 
Latin  once  common  in  most  of  the  Ro- 
man Provinces,  but  which  underwent  divers 
changes  in  various  regions — changes  which 
have  produced  the  various  related  forms  of 
speech — French,  ItaUan,  Spanish,  Portuguese, 
etc. — which  are  united  under  the  common 
name  of  Romance  languages.  These  Latin 
words  suffered  many  transformations  in  be- 
coming French;  many  of  the  consonants  and 
vowels  were  so  changed,  and  the  words  were 
so  shortened  and  clipped  by  the  omission  of 
unaccented  syllables,  that  their  connection 
with  their  Latin  ancestors  is  often  not  very 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  8S 

apparent.  As  later  in  the  history  of  English 
many  of  these  words  came  into  the  language 
in  forms  more  nearly  approaching  their  Latin 
originals,  we  can  see  by  comparing  them  with 
those  adopted  from  the  French,  after  they  had 
undergone  the  process  of  phonetic  decay,  how 
greatly  they  had  been  changed  in  that  process. 
Thus  compute  and  count  both  descend  from  the 
Latin  computare;  secure  and  sure,  blaspheme 
and  blame,  dominion  and  dungeon,  dignity  and 
dainty,  cadence  and  chance  are  others  among 
these  "doublets,"  as  they  are  called,  in  which 
the  longer  form  of  the  word  in  each  case 
is  more  directly  from  the  Latin,  while  the 
shorter  has  suffered  a  French  transformation. 
But  the  French  language  has  undergone 
considerable  and  more  recent  changes  since 
the  date  when  the  Normans  brought  it  into 
England.  Some  words  that  we  borrowed 
have  become  obsolete  in  their  native  country, 
some  consonants  have  been  dropped,  and  the 
sound  of  others  has  been  changed;  we  retain, 
for  instance,  the  s  that  the  French  have  lost 
in  many  words  like  beast  and  feast,  which  are 
bete  and  fete  in  Modern  French.  So,  too, 
the  sound  of  ch  has  become  sh  in  France; 


34  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

but  in  our  words  of  early  borrowing,  like 
chamber,  charity ,  etc.,  we  keep  the  old  pro- 
nunciation. We  keep,  moreover,  in  many 
cases  forms  peculiar  to  the  Norman  dialect, 
as  caitiff,  canker,  carrion,  etc.,  in  which  c 
before  a  did  not  become  ch,  as  it  did  in  the 
Parisian  dialect;  cark  and  charge  are  both 
from  the  same  Latin  word  carricare,  but  one 
is  the  Norman  and  the  other  the  Parisian 
form  of  the  word.  Li  many  cases  the  g  of 
Norman  French  was  changed  to  j  in  the 
Central  dialects,  and  our  word  gaol  has  pre- 
served its  northern  spelling,  while  it  is  pro- 
nounced, and  sometimes  written,  with  the 
j  of  Parisian  French. 

When  in  the  year  1204  Normandy  was  lost 
to  the  EngUsh  Crown,  and  the  English  Nor- 
mans were  separated  from  their  relatives  on 
the  Continent,  their  French  speech  began  to 
change,  as  all  forms  of  speech  must  change, 
and  developed  into  a  dialect  of  its  own,  with 
some  peculiar  forms,  and  many  words  bor- 
rowed from  the  Enghsh.  This  was  at  first  the 
language  of  the  court  and  law  in  England;  it 
was  taught  in  the  schools  and  written  in  legal 
enactments,  and  continued  to  be  used  by 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  35 

lawyers  for  more  than  three  hundred  years. 
Indeed,  in  the  form  of  what  is  called  "Law 
French"  it  continued  in  use  down  to  quite 
recent  times.  An  attempt  was  indeed  made 
in  the  XlVth  Century  to  replace  French  by 
English  in  the  law  courts,  but  the  lawyers 
went  on  thinking  and  writing  in  French,  and 
developed  Httle  by  little  a  queer  jargon  of 
their  own,  which  continued  in  use  down  to  the 
end  of  the  XVIIth  Century.  From  this  dialect 
or  technical  law- jargon  many  words  were 
adopted  into  English,  not  only  strictly  legal 
terms  like  jury,  larceny,  lease,  per  jury,  etc.,  but 
other  words  which  have  gained  a  more  popu- 
lar use — as  assets,  embezzle,  disclaim,  distress, 
hu£  and  cry,  hotchpotch,  improve.  One  of  the 
most  curious  of  these  is  the  word  culprit, 
which  is  a  contraction  of  the  legal  phrase 
*' culpable;  prest,'*  meaning  "(he  is)  guilty 
(and  we  are)  ready  (to  prove  it)." 

It  was,  then,  from  this  Anglo-  or  Norman 
French  that  the  earhest  of  our  French  words 
were  derived,  and  the  greater  part  of  those 
borrowed  before  1350  were  probably  from 
this  source.  In  the  meantime,  however,  the 
Central  or  Parisian  French  dialect,  having 


96         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

become  the  language  of  the  French  Court  and 
of  French  Hterature,  began  to  be  fashionable 
in  England,  and  many  words  were  adopted 
from  it  into  English.  It  is  by  no  means 
always  easy  to  distinguish  between  the  sources 
of  French  words,  whether  they  came  to  us 
from  Anglo-  or  Parisian  French.  In  many 
cases  the  forms  are  the  same,  but  as  a  rule 
the  early  and  popular  words  may  be  put  down 
to  Anglo-French,  and  the  later  adoptions  and 
the  learned  words  to  borrowings  from  the 
literary  language  of  Paris. 

In  addition  to  these  two  classes,  the  first 
borrowings  from  Anglo-French,  and  the  later 
ones  from  the  Parisian  French,  we  have  in 
English  a  third  class  of  words  borrowed  from 
French  in  more  recent  times.  Speaking  in 
general  terms  we  may  say  that  down  to  about 
1650  the  French  words  that  were  borrowed 
were  thoroughly  naturalized  in  English,  and 
were  made  sooner  or  later  to  conform  to  the 
rules  of  English  pronunciation  and  accent; 
while  in  the  later  borrowings  (unless  they  have 
become  very  popular)  an  attempt  is  made  to 
pronounce  them  in  the  French  fashion.  The 
tendency  in  English  is  to  put  the  accent  on 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  S7 

the  first  syllable,  and  this  has  affected  the 
words  of  older  adoption.  But  in  words  more 
recently  borrowed,  like  grimace,  bizarre,  etc., 
we  throw  the  accent  forward  to  imitate  as 
nearly  as  we  can  the  French  accent.  Words 
have  sometimes  been  borrowed  twice,  as 
gentle  and  genteel,  dragon  and  dragoon,  gallant 
and  galldnt;  and  the  older  can  easily  be  dis- 
tinguished from  the  later  by  the  position  of 
the  accent.  If  words  like  baron,  button, 
mutton,  had  been  recent  and  not  old  borrow- 
ings we  should  have  pronounced  them  baroon, 
buttoon,  muttoon,  as  we  pronounce  buffoon, 
cartoon,  balloon,  and  many  others  derived  from 
the  French  words  ending  in  on.  In  these 
modern  borrowings,  moreover,  we  preserve 
as  much  as  we  can  the  modern  pronunciation 
of  the  French  consonants,  as  we  can  see  in 
the  soft  ch  of  chandelier  and  chaperon  (as 
compared  with  the  older  chandler  and  chapel) 
and  the  soft  g  in  massage,  mirage,  prestige, 
while  the  older  soulid  is  kept  in  message  and 
cabbage. 

There  are  no  words  in  English  so  unfixed 
and  fluctuating  as  these  late  borrowings  from 
the  French,  and  there  is  often  no  standard 


88  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

by  which  we  can  decide  how  we  are  to  speak 
them.  Some,  Hke  envelope  and  avalanchey 
have  two  pronunciations,  one  EngHsh,  and 
one  as  nearly  French  as  possible,  and  one 
word,  vase,  is  spoken  in  at  least  three  ways. 
As  so  often  in  the  case  of  language,  we  find  two 
tendencies  at  work,  one  following  the  old  rule 
to  pronounce  the  words  as  English  words,  to 
give  the  vowels  and  consonants  their  EngUsh 
sounds,  and  to  throw  back  the  accent.  This 
ajffects  words  which  have  become  popular  and 
familiar  and  are  in  common  use,  like  glacier 
and  valet.  The  other  tendency,  which  seems 
to  be  growing  stronger  in  recent  years,  is  to 
keep  as  much  as  possible  the  foreign  sounds 
and  accent,  as  in  promenade,  croquet,  trait, 
mirage,  prestige,  rouge,  ballet,  dSbris,  nuance. 
This  tendency,  due,  perhaps,  to  the  wider 
study  of  French,  has  had  a  curious  effect  in 
changing  the  pronunciation  and  spelling  of 
a  number  of  old-established  and  long-natural- 
ized words.  Thus  biscuit,  which,  in  the  form 
of  bisket,  is  found  as  an  old  English  word,  has 
recently  put  on  a  French  costume,  although 
its  pronunciation  has  not  yet  been  changed, 
and  blv£  has  been  altered  from  the  older  blew 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  39 

owing  to  French  influence.  Several  old  words 
have  had  their  accent  changed  by  the  same 
cause.  Police  is  an  old  word  in  English,  and 
still  retains  its  English  accent  (like  malice)  in 
parts  of  Ireland  and  Scotland;  and  our  old 
word  marine  has  had  its  pronunciation 
changed,  owing  to  the  influence  of  the  French 
marine.  Even  a  word  like  invalid,  of  Latin 
origin,  has  (when  used  as  a  noun)  thrown 
its  accent  forward  to  correspond  to  the  French 
invalide.  This  tendency  to  give  a  foreign 
character  to  old-established  words  is  a  curious 
manifestation  of  that  capricious  force  called 
the  Genius  of  the  Language;  when  a  word  has 
what  we  may  call  a  French  or  foreign  meaning, 
as  in  rouge  or  ballet,  a  foreign  pronunciation, 
or  an  attempt  at  it,  may  perhaps  make  it 
more  expressive;  but  there  is  surely  no  reason 
why  such  words  as  trait  and  vase  should  not 
be  pronounced  after  the  English  fashion; 
and  we  might  well  be  spared  the  discomfort 
and  embarrassment  of  our  attempts  to  keep 
the  nasal  sound  of  the  French  n  in  words  like 
encore,  ennui,  nonchalant,  nuance. 

As  we  have  seen,  the  main  additions  to  the 
English  language,  additions  so  great  as  to 


40         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

change  its  character  in  a  fundamental  way, 
were  from  the  French,  first  of  all  from  the 
Northern  French  of  the  Norman  Conquerors, 
and  then  from  the  literary  and  learned  speech 
of  Paris.  But  the  French  language,  as  we 
have  also  seen,  is  mainly  based  on  Latin — 
not  on  the  Latin  of  classical  Kterature,  but 
the  popular  spoken  language,  the  speech  of 
the  soldiers  and  uneducated  people;  and  the 
Latin  words  were  so  clipped,  changed,  and 
deformed  by  them  (not,  however,  capri- 
ciously, but  in  accordance  with  certain  definite 
laws)  that  they  are  often  at  first  unrecog- 
nizable. From  early  times,  however,  a  large 
number  of  Latin  words  were  taken  into 
French,  and  thence  into  English,  from  hterary 
Latin;  and  as  they  were  never  used  in  popular 
speech,  they  did  not  undergo  this  process  of 
popular  transformation. 

But  when  we  speak  of  learned  words 
adopted  from  the  Latin,  we  must  not  suppose 
that  the  scholars  and  literary  men  of  that  time 
borrowed,  as  we  should  now  borrow,  from  the 
classical  Latin  studied  in  our  schools,  the 
language  of  the  great  orators  and  poets  of 
Rome.    The  Latin  from  which  they  borrowed 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  41 

was  not  a  dead,  but  a  Kving  language,  a 
language  which  they  spoke  and  wrote,  and 
which,  although  it  was  descended  from 
classical  Latin,  and  preserved  many  of  its 
forms,  yet  differed  from  it  in  many  ways, 
and  was  regarded  as  barbarous  by  the 
scholars  of  the  Renaissance.  It  was  the 
speech  of  a  small  minority,  of  a  few  thousand 
learned  men,  almost  all  in  religious  orders, 
an  aristocracy  intellectual  and  cosmopolitan, 
who  preserved  in  the  Dark  Ages  something 
of  the  literary  tradition  of  classical  times,  and 
made  to  it  important  contributions  of  their 
own.  It  was  a  universal  language  for  the 
scholars  of  all  Europe;  and,  even  in  England, 
men  from  different  districts  could  converse 
in  it  better  than  in  their  local  and  often 
mutually  unintelligible  dialects.  It  disap- 
peared at  last  in  the  XVIth  Century,  owing 
to  the  efforts  of  the  Humanists  and  the 
Ciceronians  to  restore  the  classical  language 
of  Rome,  but  not  before  it  had  had  an  im- 
mense effect  on  modern  French  and  English. 
By  far  the  greater  part  of  the  learned  Latin 
words  adopted  into  French,  and  from  French 
into  English,  from  the  IXth  to  the  XlVth 


42  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Centuries  are  derived  from  this  Low  Latin; 
many  of  them  are,  of  course,  classical  in  form, 
but  many,  especially  the  abstract  words,  have 
been  formed  by  the  addition  of  terminations 
in  the  medieval  Latin.  In  the  XTVth  Cen- 
tury, however,  when  the  first  effects  of  the 
classical  renaissance  began  to  make  themselves 
felt,  words  began  to  be  borrowed  into  French 
direct  from  Classical  Latin:  this  process  went 
on  with  increased  rapidity  in  the  XVth 
Century;  and  towards  its  end,  and  at  the 
beginning  of  the  XVIth  Century,  almost  a 
new  language  formed  on  classical  models  was 
created  in  France. 

With  the  importation,  therefore,  of  the 
French  vocabulary  into  Enghsh,  many  of  the 
learned  words  borrowed  first  from  Late,  and 
then  from  Classical  Latin,  were  adopted  into 
our  language.  But  in  England  also  Latin 
was  spoken  by  the  clergy  and  learned  men  of 
the  country,  the  Bible  and  the  service-books 
were  in  Latin,  and  historical  and  devotional 
books  were  largely  written  in  it.  When  these 
Latin  books  were  translated  into  English, 
or  when  a  scholar  writing  in  English  wished 
to  use  a  Latin  word,  he  followed  the  analogy 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  43 

of  the  Latin  words  that  had  already  come  to 
us  through  the  French,  and  altered  them  as 
if  they  had  first  been  adopted  into  French. 
It  is  often,  therefore,  difficult  to  say  whether 
a  Latin  word  has  come  to  us  through  the 
French,  or  has  been  taken  immediately  from 
the  Latin. 

A  curious  tendency,  due  not  so  much  to  the 
genius  of  the  language  as  to  the  self-conscious 
action  of  learned  people,  has  affected  the  form 
of  Latin  words  both  in  English  and  French, 
but  more  drastically,  perhaps,  on  this  side  of 
the  Channel.  From  early  times  a  feehng  has 
existed  that  the  popular  forms  of  words  were 
incorrect,  and  attempts  more  or  less  capri- 
cious, and  often  wrong,  have  been  made  to 
change  back  the  words  to  shapes  more  in 
accordance  with  their  original  speUing.  Thus 
the  h  was  added  to  words  like  umble,  onour, 
abit,  etc.;  b  was  inserted  in  debt  (to  show  its 
derivation  from  the  Latin  debitum),  and  /  in 
faulty  as  a  proof  of  its  relation  to  the  Latin 
fallere,  and  p  found  its  way  into  receipt  as  a 
token  of  the  Latin  receptum.  These  pedantic 
forms  were  either  borrowed  direct  into  English 
from  the  French,  or  in  many  old  words  the 


44         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

change  was  made  by  English  scholars;  and 
in  some  words,  as  for  instance  debt  and  fauU, 
their  additions  have  remained  in  EngUsh, 
while  in  French  the  words  have  reverted  to 
their  old  spelling.  These  changes,  as  in 
honouTy  debty  receipt,  do  not  always  affect  the 
pronunciation;  but  in  many  words,  as  vauU, 
fault,  assault,  the  letters  pedantically  inserted 
have  come  gradually  to  be  pronounced. 
FauU  rhymed  with  thought  in  the  XVEIIth 
Century,  and  only  in  the  XlXth  Century  has 
h  come  to  be  pronounced  in  humble  and  hos- 
pital. More  inexcusable  are  the  many  errors 
introduced  into  EngUsh  spelUng  by  old 
pedantry,  and  among  our  words  which  have 
been  deformed  by  this  learned  ignorance  may 
be  mentioned  advance  and  advantage  (properly 
avance  and  avantage)  and  scent  and  scissors, 
which  should  have  been  spelt  sent  and  sissors. 
The  borrowing  of  words  direct  from  the 
Latin,  which  began  first  in  prehistoric  times, 
continued  in  the  Anglo-Saxon  period,  and  only 
attained  large  proportions  in  the  XlVth  and 
XVth  Centuries;  but  it  has  continued  un- 
interruptedly ever  since,  until  perhaps  one- 
fourth  of   the  Latin  vocabulary  has  been 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  45 

transplanted,  either  directly  or  through  the 
French,  into  the  English  language.  While 
most  of  these  words  are  re-formed  in  English 
according  to  definite  usage,  nouns  being  taken 
from  the  stem  of  the  accusative,  and  verbs 
from  that  of  the  past  participle,  there  is  really 
no  absolute  rule  save  that  of  convenience 
about  the  matter.  The  nominative  form 
appears  as  in  terminus,  bonus,  stimulus,  etc., 
the  ablative  in  folio,  the  gerund  in  memoran- 
dum and  innuendo,  different  parts  of  the 
verb  as  in  veto  and  affidavit.  Recipe  is  the 
imperative  directing  the  apothecary  to  take 
certain  drugs,  and  dirge  is  from  another 
imperative,  the  dirige,  Domine  of  Psalm  v.  8, 
used  as  an  antiphon  in  the  service  for  the  dead. 
As  French  was  full  of  learned  Latin  words, 
so  Latin  in  its  turn  abounded  in  expressions 
borrowed  from  the  Greek,  and  thus  Greek 
words  were  through  the  Latin  adopted  into 
French  and  English.  With  one  or  two  very 
early  exceptions  to  be  mentioned  later,  all 
the  Greek  words  found  in  English  before  the 
XVIth  Century  are  derived  from  Latin 
sources,  and  are  spelt  and  pronounced,  not 
as  they  were  in  Greek,  but  as  the  Romans 


40         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

spelt  and  pronounced  them.  The  Greek  u 
became  a  y  in  Latm,  and  the  k  a  c;  when  after 
the  Roman  time  c  lost  the  somid  of  k  before 
e  and  i  and  y,  the  pronunciation  of  many 
Greek  words  was  changed,  and  we  get  a  word 
like  the  modern  cycle,  which  is  very  unlike  the 
Greek  kuklos.  Other  Greek  words  have  been 
early  adopted  into  the  popular  vocabulary, 
and  have  undergone  the  strange  transforma- 
tions that  popular  words  undergo.  Learned 
names  for  diseases  and  flowers  are  peculiarly 
liable  to  be  affected  by  this  process;  thus 
dropsy  stands  for  the  Greek  hydropsis,  palsy 
for  paralysis,  emerald  for  the  Greek  smarag- 
dos;  aihanasia  has  become  tansy,  and  karuo- 
phyllon  gillyflower  in  English.  This  process 
still  goes  on  whenever  a  Greek  word  comes 
into  common  and  popular  use;  pediment  is 
believed  to  be  a  workingman*s  corruption, 
through  perimint,  of  pyramid;  banjo  has  come 
to  us  through  the  pronunciation  of  negro 
slaves  from  the  Spanish  bandurria,  which  is 
ultimately  derived  from  the  Greek  pandoura; 
and  we  are  now  witnessing  the  struggle  of  the 
Genius  of  the  Language  with  the  popular  but 
somewhat  indigestible  word  cineraatograph. 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  47 

By  the  middle  of  the  XVIth  Century, 
Greek  was  so  well  known  in  England  that 
scholars  began  to  borrow  from  it  directly, 
without  the  intervention  of  French  and  Latin. 
These  were  all  learned  adoptions,  and  they 
were  for  the  most  part  conducted  in  an 
absurdly  learned  way;  these  old  scholars  took 
a  pedantic  pride  in  adorning  their  pages  with 
the  actual  Greek  letters,  and  thus  words  like 
axyme,  apotheosis,  and  many  others  are  in 
XVIth  and  XVIIth  Century  books  often 
printed  in  Greek  type.  Very  lately  in  the 
XlXth  Century  a  tendency  has  shown  itself 
to  adopt  words,  not  with  the  Latin,  but  with 
the  original  Greek  spelling  (as  nearly  as  we 
can  reproduce  it),  and  now,  with  our  modern 
passion  for  correctness,  and  the  modern 
weakening  of  the  traditions  of  the  language, 
words,  especially  scientific  terms,  tend  to 
keep  their  Greek  appearance,  as  we  see  in  a 
word  like  kinetics,  which  would  have  become 
cinetics  had  it  been  borrowed  earlier. 

This  short  account  of  the  Gieek  element  in 
English  must  suffice  for  the  present,  although 
the  enormous  influence  of  Greek  on  our 
language  is  by  no  means  to  be  measured  by 


48         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

the  number  of  Greek  words  in  English.  For 
a  very  large  part  of  our  vocabulary  of  thought 
and  culfeiu'e  comes  from  Greece  by  means 
of  literal  translations  into  Latin.  Of  these 
words  we  shall  speak  when  we  come  to  the 
history  of  thought  and  culture,  and  in  that 
division  of  our  subject  we  can  best  treat  of 
our  later  borrowings  from  modem  languages, 
such  as  Dutch  and  Spanish,  and  all  the 
travellers*  words  brought  into  English  from 
Indian,  African,  and  American  languages. 
There  remain,  however,  three  other  ele- 
ments of  early  English — the  Celtic,  the 
Scandinavian,  and  the  Teutonic  words  that 
have  come  to  us  through  French  or  Italian 
channels. 

It  is  one  of  the  puzzles  of  English  philology 
that  so  very  few  words  of  Celtic  origin  have 
been  adopted  into  the  language.  The  Teu- 
tonic invaders  found  and  conquered  a  Celtic 
race  dwelling  in  England;  there  is  evidence 
to  show  that  the  conquered  race  was  not 
entirely  massacred,  but  that  a  large  portion 
of  it  was  united  with  the  conquerors,  and  yet 
the  number  of  Celtic  words  adopted  into 
English  before  the  Xllth  Century  is  less  than 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  49 

a  dozen,  and  several  of  these  were  probably 
imported  from  Ireland  or  the  Continent. 
Bin  and  dun  (a  colour),  coomb  (a  small 
valley),  and  one  or  two  more  words  are 
the  only  ones  that  seem  to  have  been  de- 
rived from  the  native  British;  and  doion 
(a  hill)  may  have  been  borrowed  from  them, 
or  perhaps  brought  by  the  Anglo-Saxons 
into  England.  Since  1200  more  words  have 
been  adopted  from  Irish  or  Scotch  Gaelic,  but 
most  of  these,  like  brogue,  bog,  galore,  pillion, 
shamrock,  are  of  fairly  recent  introduction; 
and  it  is  certainly  very  curious  that  no  word 
of  any  great  importance  has  been  borrowed 
by  the  English  from  their  Welsh-speaking 
neighbours.  Many  more  Celtic  words  have 
come  into  our  language  indirectly  through 
French  channels.  The  Romans  borrowed  a 
few  Celtic  terms;  the  original  inhabitants  of 
Gaul  were  Celts,  the  Bretons  still  speak  a 
Celtic  language,  and  from  these  sources  a 
number  of  Celtic  words  have  found  their  way 
into  French,  and  from  French  into  English. 
Among  these  words  of  probable  or  possible 
Celtic  origin  may  be  mentioned  battle,  beak, 
bray  (of  a  donkey),  budget,  car  (and  its  deriva- 


60         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

tives,  careefy  cargoy  cark,  carryy  cart,  charge, 
cJmrioty  etc.)»  carpenter,  gravel,  league,  mutton, 
tan,  truant,  valet,  varlet,  vassal.  Many  more 
words  than  these  are  commonly  given  as 
being  of  Celtic  origin,  but  the  tendency  of 
modern  scholarship  is  to  decrease  the  number 
of  Celtic  words  in  English:  and  even  in  the 
above  list  many  are  considered  to  be  very 
doubtful.  One  curious  and  charming  form 
is  found  in  the  Irish-English  with  which  we 
have  been  dehghted  lately,  namely  a  literal 
translation  of  Celtic  idioms  into  EngHsh,  as 
in  such  phrases  as  "Is  herself  at  home?" 
"Is  it  reading  you  are?"  "He  interrupted 
me,  and  I  writing  my  letters." 

The  French  not  only  brought  us  a  number 
of  Celtic  words,  but  an  even  larger  mmiber 
of  native  Teutonic  terms  came  back  to  our 
Teutonic  speech  through  French  channels 
— words  that  we  had  lost,  words  that  had 
arisen  in  Germany  after  our  ancestors  came 
to  England,  or  Frenchified  forms  which  sup- 
planted the  Anglo-Saxon  words  derived  from 
the  same  source.  The  Teutonic  barbarians 
who  served  in  the  Roman  armies  added  some 
words  to  the  Latin  language;    the  Franks 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  51 

who  conquered  France  and  gave  their  name 
to  that  country,  the  Gothic  and  Burgundian 
invaders,  enriched  the  French  language  with 
many  terms  of  war,  of  feudaUsm,  and  of  sport; 
and  finally  the  Norman  Conquerors  of  the 
Xlth  Century  added  a  few  terms,  mostly 
nautical,  of  their  original  Scandinavian 
speech,  such  as  equip ^  flounder  (the  fish),  and 
perhaps  the  verb  to  sound.  Nearly  three 
hundred  Teutonic  words  altogether  have  come 
to  us  from  French  sources,  and  form  no  in- 
considerable or  unimportant  addition  to  the 
language.  Moreover,  if  we  compare  these 
travelled  words  with  their  stay-at-home  rela- 
tions, we  can  in  many  cases  see  what  richness 
of  meaning  they  have  gained  by  being  steeped 
in  the  great  Romance  civilization  of  Europe. 
Park,  for  instance,  is  a  Teutonic  word,  en- 
nobled by  French  usage  far  beyond  the  mean- 
ing of  its  humble  native  cousin  paddock;  blue, 
by  passing  through  southern  minds,  has 
acquired  a  brilliance  not  to  be  found  in  our 
dialect  blae,  of  dark  and  dingy  colour;  our 
bench  has  become  through  Italian  the  bank 
of  finance,  and  has  given  rise  to  banquet;  and 
among  other  homely  old  German  words  thus 


52         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

embellished  by  their  foreign  travels  may 
be  mentioned  dance,  garden,  gaiety,  salon, 
harbinger,  gonfalon,  banner,  and  herald. 

The  other  great  Teutonic  addition  to  the 
English  language  is  that  from  Scandinavian 
sources.  When  the  Danes  came  to  England, 
they  brought  with  them  a  language  now  called 
**01d  Norse,"  which  was  closely  related  to 
Anglo-Saxon.  Many  of  the  words,  however, 
were  different,  and  a  large  number  of  these 
were  ultimately  taken  into  English.  As, 
however,  our  earhest  EngUsh  Hterature  was 
almost  all  written  in  the  dialect  of  the  South, 
where  the  Danes  did  not  settle,  but  few  Scan- 
dinavian words  appear  in  Enghsh  before  the 
Xnth  Century.  When,  however,  the  lan- 
guage of  the  Midlands  and  the  North,  where 
there  were  large  Danish  settlements,  began 
to  be  written,  the  strong  infusion  of  Scandi- 
navian elements  became  apparent.  And 
from  the  northern  dialects,  which  abound  in 
Old  Norse  words,  standard  English  has  ever 
since  been  borrowing  terms;  a  great  army  of 
them  appear  in  the  Xlllth  Century,  words  so 
strong  and  vigorous  as  to  drive  out  their 
Anglo-Saxon  equivalents,   as  take  and  cast 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  53 

replaced  the  Anglo-Saxon  niman  and  weorpan, 
and  raise  has  driven  the  old  English  rear  into 
the  archaic  language  of  poetry.  Even  when 
the  English  words  have  survived,  they  have 
sometimes  been  assimilated  to  the  Scandina- 
vian form,  as  in  words  hke  give  and  sister. 
Other  famihar  words  of  Scandinavian  origin 
are  call,  fellow,  get,  hit,  leg,  low,  root,  same,  skin, 
want,  wrong.  The  familiar  everyday  and 
useful  character  of  these  words  shows  how 
great  is  the  Danish  influence  on  the  language, 
and  how  strongly  the  Scandinavian  element 
persisted  when  the  two  races  were  amalga- 
mated. This  drifting  into  standard  English 
of  Scandinavian  words  from  northern  dia- 
lects still  goes  on;  the  following  words  are 
possibly  of  Scandinavian  origin,  and  have 
made  their  appearance  from  dialects  into 
literary  English  at  about  the  dates  which  are 
appended  to  them:  billow  (1552),  to  batten 
(1591),  clumsy  (1597),  blight  (1619),  doze 
(1647),  gill  or  ghyll  (a  steep  ravine,  Words- 
worth, 1787),  a  beck  (a  stream.  Sou  they, 
1795),  to  nag  (1835),  and  to  scamp  (1837). 

It  is  from  these  and  some  other  minor 
sources,  to  be  mentioned  later,  that  English 


54         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

has  derived  its  curiously  mixed  character, 
and  the  great  variety  and  richness  of  its 
vocabulary.  No  purist  has  ever  objected 
to  the  Teutonic  words  that  have  come 
to  us  from  Scandinavian  or  French  sources; 
but  the  upsetting  of  so  large  a  part  of  the 
French,  Latin,  and  Greek  vocabularies  into 
English  speech  is  a  more  or  less  unique 
phenomenon  in  the  history  of  language,  and 
its  supposed  advantages  or  disadvantages 
have  been  the  subject  of  much  discussion. 
Writers  who  attempt  to  criticize  and  estimate 
the  value  of  different  forms  of  speech  often 
begin  with  an  air  of  impartiahty,  but  soon 
arrive  at  the  comfortable  conclusion  that  their 
own  language,  owing  to  its  manifest  advan- 
tages, its  beauties,  its  rich  powers  of  expres- 
sion, is  on  the  whole  by  far  the  best  and 
noblest  of  all  living  forms  of  speech.  The 
Frenchman,  the  German,  the  Italian,  the 
Englishman,  to  each  of  whom  his  own  liter- 
ature and  the  great  traditions  of  his  national 
life  are  most  dear  and  familiar,  cannot  help 
but  feel  that  the  vernacular  in  which  these 
are  embodied  and  expressed  is,  and  must  be, 
superior  to  the  alien  and  awkward  languages 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  55 

of  his  neighbours;  nor  can  he  easily  escape 
the  conclusion  that  in  respect  to  his  own 
speech,  whatever  has  happened  has  been  an 
advantage,  and  whatever  is  is  good. 

It  will  be  as  well,  therefore,  in  regard  to 
this  question  of  a  mixed  vocabulary,  to  state 
as  impartially  as  is  humanly  possible  the 
considerations  on  which  the  two  opposing 
ideals  are  based — the  ideal  of  a  pure  language, 
built  up  as  much  as  possible  on  native  sources, 
and  that  of  a  comprehensive  speech,  borrow- 
ing the  words  from  other  nations. 

Let  us  begin  with  the  ideal  of  "purity," 
which  in  many  European  languages,  such  as 
German,  Bohemian,  and  modern  Greek,  is 
leading  to  determined  efforts  to  keep  out 
foreign  words,  and  to  drive  out  those  that 
have  already  been  adopted.  The  upholders 
of  this  ideal  maintain  that  extensive  borrow- 
ing from  other  nations  is  a  proof  of  want  of 
imagination,  and  a  certain  weakness  of  mental 
activity;  that  a  people  who  cannot,  or  do  not, 
take  the  trouble  to  find  native  words  for  new 
conceptions,  show  thereby  the  poverty  of 
their  invention,  and  the  weakness  of  their 
"speech-feehng."    The  desire  to  use  foreign 


66  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

terms  comes,  these  patriots  of  language  be- 
lieve, partly  also  from  vanity,  to  show  one's 
familiarity  with  foreign  culture;  and  they 
claim  that  the  use  of  native  compounds  for 
abstract  ideas  is  a  great  advantage,  as  it 
enables  even  the  uneducated  to  obtain  some 
notion  of  the  meaning  of  these  high  terms. 
They  maintain,  moreover,  that  just  as  an 
old-fashioned  farmer  prided  himself  on  pro- 
curing the  main  staples  of  life  from  his  own 
farm  and  garden,  and  found  a  fresher  taste 
in  the  fruit  and  vegetables  of  his  own  grow- 
ing, so  we  find  in  words  which  are  the  prod- 
uct of  our  own  soil,  and  are  akin  to  the 
ancient  terms  of  our  speech,  an  intimate 
meaning,  and  a  beauty  not  possessed  by 
exotic  products.  These  words  breed  in  us 
a  proud  sense  of  the  old  and  noble  race  from 
which  we  are  descended;  they  link  the  present 
to  the  past,  and  carry  on  the  tradition  of 
our  nation  to  the  new  generations.  The 
Main  upholders  of  this  view  are  the  modern 
Germans,  who  take  a  great  pride  in  the  purity 
of  their  language,  and  compare  it  to  that  of 
Greece,  which,  in  spite  of  the  immense  influ- 
ence on  it  of  Eastern  civihzation,  and  the 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  57 

great  number  of  ideas  and  products  it  bor- 
rowed from  thence,  yet  has  so  strong  a  f eeHng 
for  language,  and  so  great  a  pride  of  race, 
that  the  Greek  of  classical  times  possessed  no 
more  than  a  few  hundred  words  borrowed 
from  other  tongues. 

In  Germany,  therefore,  since  the  XVIIth 
Century,  a  deliberate  effort  has  arisen  to  make 
the  language  still  more  pure,  and  societies 
have  been  formed  for  this  especial  purpose. 
This  movement  has  grown  with  the  growth 
of  national  unity,  and  a  powerful  society,  the 
Sprachverein,  has  been  recently  founded,  and 
has  published  handbooks  of  native  words  for 
almost  every  department  of  modern  life. 

Although  English  is  so  hopelessly  mixed  a 
language  that  any  such  attempt  to  "purify  '* 
it  would  be  hopeless,  nevertheless  the  use 
of  Saxon  words  has  often  been  advocated 
among  us,  and  even  here  Usts  have  been 
suggested  of  native  compounds  that  might 
replace  some  of  our  foreign  terms;  as 
steadholder  for  lieutenant,  whimwork  for  gro- 
tesque, folkward  for  parapet,  amd  folkwain  for 
omnibus. 

Those,  however,  who  defend  a  mixed  Ian- 


58  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

guage  like  Latin  or  English,  maintain  that  the 
ideal  of  purity  is  really  in  its  essence  a  political 
and  not  a  philological  one;  that  it  is  due  to 
political  aspirations  or  resentments;  that  the 
Germans  desire  to  banish,  with  their  French 
words,  the  memory  of  the  long  literary  and 
political  domination  of  France  over  their 
native  country;  that  for  the  same  reason  the 
Bohemians  wish  to  rid  themselves  of  German 
words,  the  modern  Greeks  of  Turkish  terms. 
They  hold  that  the  patriots  in  language  are 
the  victims  also  of  a  fallacy  which  all  history 
disproves — the  fallacy,  namely,  that  there  is 
some  connection  between  the  purity  of  lan- 
guage and  the  purity  of  race;  that  most 
modem  races,  however  pure  their  language, 
are  of  mixed  origins,  and  that  many  races 
speak  a  tongue  borrowed  either  from  their  con- 
querors, or  from  the  peoples  they  have  them- 
selves subdued.  And  as  we  are  aU  of  mixed 
race,  so  our  civilization  is  equally  derived 
from  various  sources;  ideas,  products,  and  in- 
ventions spread  from  one  nation  to  another, 
and  finally  become  the  common  inheritance  of 
humanity,  and  they  hold  it,  therefore,  a  natural 
process  for  foreign  names  to  spread  with  foreign 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  59 

ideas,  and  to  form  a  common  vocabulary,  the 
beginnings  of  an  international  speech,  in  which 
we  can  all,  to  some  extent,  at  least  under- 
stand each  other.  An  independent  nation, 
conscious  of  its  strength,  and  not  afraid  of 
being  overwhelmed  by  foreign  influences,  does 
well,  therefore,  in  their  view,  to  welcome 
the  foreign  names  of  foreign  products.  It 
does  not  thus  corrupt,  but  really  enriches  its 
language;  and  even  when,  as  in  English,  it 
possesses  a  multitude  of  synonyms,  partly 
native  and  partly  foreign,  for  more  or  less 
the  same  conceptions,  this  variety  of  terms 
is  a  great  advantage;  for  the  Genius  of  the 
Language,  which  works  more  by  making  use 
of  existing  terms  than  by  creating  them,  is 
enabled  to  give  to  each  a  different  shade  of 
meaning.  Thus,  as  Mr.  Bradley  points  out, 
the  subtle  shades  of  difference  of  meaning, 
of  emotional  significance,  between  such  pairs 
of  words  in  English  as  paternal  and  fatherly, 
fortune  and  luck,  celestial  and  heavenly,  royal 
and  kingly,  could  not  easily  be  rendered  in 
any  other  language.  While  the  upholders  of 
this  view  would  admit  that  the  words  of  Saxon 
origin  are  as  a  rule  more  vivid  and  expressive. 


60         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

they  maintain  that  this  expressiveness  is 
largely  due  to  the  existence  with  them  of  less 
vivid  synonyms  from  the  Latin,  and  that 
these  words,  moreover,  can  be  appropriately 
employed  for  statements  in  which  we  wish 
to  avoid  over-emphasis,  a  force  of  diction 
stronger  than  the  feelings  we  wish  to  express, 
which  is  a  fault  of  style  as  reprehensible  and 
often  more  armoying  than  inadequate  ex- 
pression. The  great  demand,  moreover,  in 
an  age  of  science  is  for  clearness  of  thought 
and  precise  definition  in  language  rather  than 
for  emotional  power,  and  it  is  often  an  advan- 
tage for  the  expression  of  abstract  ideas,  to 
possess  terms  borrowed  for  this  purpose  only 
from  a  foreign  language,  which  express  their 
abstract  meaning  and  nothing  more,  unhin- 
dered by  the  rich  but  confusing  associations 
of  native  etymology.  From  this  point  of 
view  abstract  words  like  our  intuition,  per- 
ceptiont  representation,  are  much  clearer  than 
their  German  equivalents;  osteology  and  path- 
ology to  be  preferred  to  bonelore  and  painlore, 
which  have  been  suggested  by  Saxon  enthu- 
siasts to  take  their  place.  And  even  for  the 
purposes   of   poetry   and   association,   they 


FOREIGN  ELEMENTS  61 

believe  that  it  is  no  small  gain  that  the  de- 
scendants of  rude  Teutonic  tribes,  inhabiting 
a  remote  and  northern  island,  should  become 
the  inheritors  of  the  traditions  of  the  great 
Greek  and  Latin  civihzation  of  the  South. 
These  traditions,  the  rich  accumulations  of 
poetic  and  historic  memories,  are  embodied 
in,  and  cling  to,  the  great  classical  words  we 
have  borrowed;  magnanimity ^  omnipotence, 
palace,  contemplate,  still  give  echoes  to  us  of 
the  greatness  of  ancient  Rome;  and  the  arts 
and  lofty  thought  of  Greece  still  live  in  great 
Greek  words  like  philosophy,  astronomy,  poem, 
planet,  idea,  and  tragedy. 

These,  then,  are  the  two  opposing  ideals — 
nationalism  in  language,  as  against  borrow- 
ing; a  pure,  as  opposed  to  a  mixed,  lan- 
guage. To  those  for  whom  nationalism  is 
the  important  thing  in  modern  life,  and 
who  could  wish  that  their  own  race  should 
derive  its  language  and  thought  from  native 
sources,  a  "pure"  language  is  the  ideal 
form  of  speech;  while  those  who  regard  the 
great  inheritance  of  European  culture  as  the 
element  of  most  importance  in  civilization, 
will  not  regret  the  composite  character  of  the 


62         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

English  language,  the  happy  marriage  which 
it  shows  of  North  and  South,  or  wish  to 
deprive  it  of  those  foreign  elements  which 
go  to  make  up  its  unparalleled  richness  and 
variety. 


CHAPTER    m 

MODERN   ENGLISH 

The  flooding  of  the  English  vocabulary 
with  French  words  began,  as  we  have  seen, 
intheXIIIth  Century,  and  reached  very  large 
proportions  in  the  century  that  followed. 
At  the  same  time  Anglo-French,  which  had 
maintained  itself  for  two  hundred  years  or 
more  as  the  language  of  the  governing  classes, 
gradually  fell  into  disuse,  and  in  1362  English 
was  adopted  in  the  law  courts,  and  at  about 
the  same  time  in  the  schools.  And  yet,  prop- 
erly speaking,  there  was  before  the  latter 
part  of  the  XTVth  Century  no  English  lan- 
guage, no  standard  form  of  speech,  under- 
stood by  all,  and  spoken  everywhere  by  the 
educated  classes.    When  such  restraining  and 


MODERN  ENGLISH  63 

conservative  influence  as  was  exercised  by  the 
West-Saxon  language  of  the  court  had  been 
removed  at  the  Conquest,  the  centrifugal 
forces,  which  are  always  present  in  language, 
and  tend  to  split  it  up  into  varieties  of  speech, 
had  begun  to  assert  themselves;  and  the  old 
dialects  of  England  diverged,  until  the  in- 
habitants of  each  part  of  the  country  could 
hardly  understand  each  other.  The  dialects 
of  this  period  can  be  roughly  divided  into 
three  main  divisions,  which  correspond  to 
the  divisions  of  speech  in  the  pre-Conquest 
period,  but  are  called  by  new  names.  In 
all  the  country  south  of  the  Thames,  what  is 
called  the  Southern  dialect  was  spoken,  and 
this  was  a  descendant  of  the  West-Saxon 
speech  which,  under  Alfred  the  Great,  had 
become  the  Hterary  language  of  England. 
North  of  the  Thames  there  were  two  main 
dialects:  the  Midland,  corresponding  to  the 
Old  Mercian;  and  the  Northern,  extending 
from  the  Humber  to  Aberdeen,  and  corre- 
sponding to  the  Old  Northumbrian.  In  each 
of  these  districts  authors,  as  far  as  they 
wrote  in  English  at  all,  wrote  in  their  own 
native  dialect;    and  in  the  middle  of  the 


64  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

XTVth  Century  it  must  have  seemed  that  the 
development  of  no  common  form  of  English 
speech  was  possible.  But  as  at  first  the 
Northern,  or  Northumbrian,  dialect  had  de- 
veloped in  the  Vlllth  Century  into  a  hterary 
language,  and  then  had  been  replaced  by 
the  Southern  or  West-Saxon,  so  now  the 
neglected  speech  of  Mercia,  the  Midland, 
was  destined  to  attain  that  supremacy  which 
it  has  since  never  lost.  The  Southern  dialect 
was  very  conservative  of  old  forms  and 
inflections;  in  the  Northern,  owing  to  the 
Danish  settlements,  changes  had  been  rapidly 
going  on,  so  that  these  two  had  become  almost 
separate  languages.  The  Midland,  however, 
less  progressive  than  the  Northern,  but  more 
advanced  than  the  Southern,  stood  between 
the  two,  and  was  more  or  less  comprehensible 
to  the  speakers  of  each  dialect.  Moreover, 
the  Midland,  being  the  speech  of  London, 
naturally  became  familiar  to  men  of  business 
and  of  the  educated  classes,  who  frequented 
the  capital;  and  it  was  the  language  of  the 
two  great  universities  as  well.  Philologists 
divide  this  Midland  dialect  into  two  sub- 
divisions:   West  Midland,  which  was  more 


MODERN  ENGLISH  65 

conservative  and  archaic  in  type;  and  East 
Midland,  which  had  been  more  affected  by- 
Danish  influence,  and  was  somewhat  more 
progressive  than  the  West.  It  was,  then,  this 
East  Midland,  spoken  in  England  and  in 
Oxford  and  Cambridge,  which  was  adopted 
as  our  standard  speech. 

This  result  was  no  doubt  greatly  helped  by 
the  greatest  man  of  literary  genius  in  this 
period,  the  poet  Chaucer.  The  part  played  by 
Ennius  in  the  formation  of  classical  Latin  is 
well  known;  Dante  did  much  to  form  modern 
Italian,  the  German  language  owes  an  im- 
mense debt  to  Luther;  and  in  the  same  way 
Chaucer  has  been  claimed  as  the  "Father 
of  the  English  language."  This  view  has, 
indeed,  been  recently  disputed,  and  it  is 
now  admitted  that  the  Midland  dialect  would 
have  become  the  standard  speech,  even  if 
Chaucer  had  never  written.  At  the  same 
time,  but  for  his  influence,  and  the  great 
popularity  of  his  writings,  this  process  would 
probably  have  been  more  hesitating  and  slow. 
He  found,  indeed,  an  already  cultivated 
language  in  the  Midland  dialect,  but  he  wrote 
it  with  an  ease,  an  elegance  and  regularity 


66  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

hitherto  unknown;  giving  it  the  stamp  of 
high  Hterature,  and  making  it  the  vehicle 
for  his  wide  cultivation  and  his  knowledge 
of  the  world.  A  Londoner  of  the  citizen 
class,  a  courtier  as  well,  a  traveller  and 
diplomatist,  he  was  admirably  fitted  to  sum 
up  and  express  in  modern  speech  the  knowl- 
edge and  varied  interests  of  his  time;  and 
when  we  add  to  this  the  splendid  accident 
of  genius,  and  the  inmiense  popularity  of  his 
poems,  we  see  how  great  his  influence  must 
have  been,  although  the  exact  character  of 
that  influence  is  not  quite  easy  to  define. 

Probably  in  addition  to  the  ease  and  poHsh 
he  gave  the  language,  Chaucer's  greatest 
contribution  was  the  large  number  of  words 
he  borrowed  from  French  and  naturalized 
in  the  language.  It  has,  indeed,  been  said 
that  there  is  no  proof  that  any  of  the  foreign 
words  in  his  writings  had  not  been  used 
before;  and  this  is,  of  course,  strictly  true,  as 
it  is  impossible  to  prove  a  negative  of  this 
kind.  But  as  the  Oxford  Dictionary  shows, 
the  number  of  these  words  not  to  be  found 
in  any  previous  writings  now  extant  is  really 
immense;   to  his  translation  of  Boethius,  to 


MODERN  ENGLISH  67 

his  work  on  Astrology,  to  his  prose  and  poems, 
are  traced  a  large  number  of  om*  great  and 
important  words,  besides  many  learned  terms, 
attentiorii  diffusion,  fractiony  duration,  position, 
first  found  in  Chaucer,  and  then  not  appar- 
ently used  again  till  the  XVIth  Century.  Al- 
most equally  important  in  their  influence  on 
the  language  were  the  Wyclif  translations  of 
the  Bible,  made  public  at  about  the  same  time 
as  Chaucer's  poems.  Wyclif,  like  Chaucer, 
wrote  in  the  dialect  of  the  East  Midlands; 
like  Chaucer  he  possessed  a  genius  for  lan- 
guage, and  in  number  and  importance  his 
contributions  to  the  Enghsh  vocabulary  seem 
(according  to  the  results  pubUshed  in  the 
Oxford  Dictionary)  to  have  almost,  if  not 
quite,  equalled  those  of  Chaucer.  While 
Chaucer  borrowed  mainly  from  the  French, 
Wyclif's  new  words  are  largely  adaptations 
from  the  Latin  of  the  Vulgate;  and,  as  he 
finds  it  necessary  to  explain  many  of  these 
words  by  notes,  it  is  fairly  certain  that  he 
himself  regarded  them  as  innovations. 

With  the  growing  importance,  then,  of  the 
East  Midland  dialect,  and  with  the  stamp 
set  upon  it  by  Chaucer  and  Wyclif,  and  the 


68         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

immense  popularity  of  their  writings,  we 
witness  at  the  end  of  the  XlVth  Century 
what  we  may  consider  to  be  the  birth  of  the 
English  language  as  we  know  it.  Despised, 
ruined,  and  destroyed;  for  three  centuries 
ousted  from  its  pride  of  place  by  an  alien 
tongue,  and  then  almost  swamped  by  the 
inrush  of  foreign  words,  yet,  like  the  fabled 
bird  of  Arabia,  it  arose  swiftly  from  its  ashes, 
and  spread  its  wings  for  new  and  hitherto 
unequalled  flights.  The  English  of  Chaucer 
and  Wyclif  was  now  accepted  as  the  standard 
language  of  the  country,  and  all  the  other 
and  rival  dialects  sank  to  the  level  of  unedu- 
cated and  local  forms  of  speech,  with  the 
exception  of  one  variety  of  the  Northern  or 
Northumbrian  dialect,  which  was  developed 
into  the  Scottish  language,  received  a  con- 
siderable amount  of  Uterary  cultivation,  and 
remained  the  standard  speech  of  Scotland, 
until  the  union  of  the  two  countries  at  the 
death  of  Queen  Elizabeth. 

But  although  Chaucer's  English  is  substan- 
tially the  language  that  we  speak,  and  there 
are  whole  pages  of  Chaucer  that  a  person 
of  ordinary  education  can  read  with  little 


MODERN  ENGLISH  69 

diflBculty,  such  a  reader  will  perceive  at 
once  great  differences  between  the  English 
of  the  XlVth  Century  and  that  of  our  own 
day;  and  should  he  not  read,  but  have  read 
to  him,  Chaucer's  poems,  with  their  correct 
and  contemporary  pronunciation,  the  dif- 
ference would  seem  still  more  startHng.  For 
no  language,  of  course,  ever  remains  un- 
changed, but  undergoes  a  perpetual  process 
of  transformation;  the  sounds  of  many 
vowels  and  consonants  are  slowly  shifted; 
the  old  words  become  outworn  or  change 
their  meaning,  and  new  terms  are  needed  to 
replace  them;  and  with  the  passing  of  time, 
fresh  experiences  are  acquired,  and  new  ways 
of  thought  and  feeling  become  popular,  and 
these  also  demand  and  find  their  appropriate 
terminology.  Grammar  also  becomes  more 
simple,  but  on  the  whole  the  change  of  Eng- 
lish since  Chaucer's  time  has  been  a  change 
in  vocabulary;  and  to  this  we  shall  return 
in  a  later  chapter.  There  are,  however, 
certain  changes  of  a  formal  character  which 
should  be  mentioned  before  we  approach 
the  history  of  the  language  in  its  connection 
with  the  history  of  culture. 


70         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

By  the  end  of  the  XlVth  Century,  as  we 
have  seen,  the  Midland  dialect  was  estab- 
lished as  standard  English;  the  introduction 
of  the  printing  press  in  the  XVth  Century, 
and  especially  the  works  printed  and  pub- 
lished by  Caxton,  made  its  supremacy  undis- 
puted, and  practically  fixed  its  form  for  the 
future.  Caxton*s  EngHsh  is,  as  we  might 
expect,  more  modern  than  that  of  Chaucer; 
the  spelling,  although  to  our  eyes  old- 
fashioned,  is  more  definite  and  settled,  and 
any  one  of  us  can  read  Caxton's  English  with 
very  little  diflBculty. 

Two  influences  of  the  XVIth  Century  had 
a  marked  effect  on  the  English  language, 
one  European  and  the  other  national.  The 
revival  of  learning,  the  renewed  study  of 
classical  Latin,  the  growth  of  the  cosmopoh- 
tan  Republic  of  learned  humanists  who  drove 
out  the  old  Low  Latin  of  the  Middle  Ages 
and  devoted  themselves  to  the  cultivation 
of  an  elegant  and  Ciceronian  prose,  made  at 
first  the  enthusiasts  of  the  new  learning 
somewhat  disdainful  of  their  mother  tongues. 
They  saw  how  rapidly  these  native  languages 
were  changing,  and  naturally  believed  that 


MODERN  ENGLISH  71 

to  write  in  the  vernacular  was  to  write  in 
a  local  and  perishing  speech — awkward, 
moreover,  and  barbarous,  and  unjfitted  to 
embody  high  thoughts  and  scholarly  dis- 
tinctions. While,  therefore,  these  scholars 
somewhat  neglected  their  native  tongues, 
or  wrote  in  them  with  apologies  and  conde- 
scension, their  study,  nevertheless,  of  classical 
models,  their  care  for  the  art  of  speech,  their 
love  of  apt  and  beautiful  words  and  rhythms 
and  phrases,  did  much  to  mould  the  Kterary 
languages  of  modern  Europe,  and  added  to 
them  many  graces  of  style,  expression,  and 
music.  Towards  the  middle  of  the  XVIth 
Century  another  and  opposing  influence  be- 
gan to  make  itself  felt.  With  the  Reforma- 
tion, and  the  growth  of  national  feeling  under 
Henry  VTII  and  his  Tudor  successors,  Eng- 
lish scholars  began  to  value  more  highly 
the  institutions  and  the  language  of  their 
own  country. 

The  Church  services  were  now  in  English; 
English  translations  of  the  Bible  were  printed, 
and  the  beauty  of  these  services  and  transla- 
tions opened  men's  eyes  to  the  value  and 
expressiveness  of  their  native  tongue.   Eng- 


72         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

lish  became  what  it  had  never  been  before — 
the  object  of  serious  study;  and  the  native 
element,  which  had  tended  to  be  overshad- 
owed by  the  Latinity  of  the  Humanists,  was 
now  more  valued  under  the  Teutonic  influence 
of  the  Reformation.  There  were  now  pa- 
triots who  started  the  ideal  of  a  pure  language, 
freed  as  much  as  possible  from  foreign  ele- 
ments; while  others  attempted,  often  too 
successfully,  as  we  have  seen,  to  remodel 
words  of  foreign  derivation.  We  now  reach, 
in  fact,  the  stage  of  a  self-conscious  language, 
no  longer  allowed  to  develop  at  its  own 
free  will,  unbound  by  rules  or  study,  but  af- 
fected, both  for  good  and  evil,  by  the  theories 
and  ideals  of  writers  and  learned  men.  Li 
the  Elizabethan  period,  however,  when  the 
influences  of  the  classical  revival  and  of  the 
growth  of  national  pride  in  England  and 
things  English  both  reached  their  highest 
mark,  and  were  mingled  together  by  the 
exuberant  vitahty  and  creative  force  of  the 
time,  the  new  ideal  of  "correctness"  could  as 
yet  make  but  little  headway  against  the 
opposing  forces  of  innovation  and  experiment. 
The  language  was  still  in  a  plastic  and  un- 


MODERN  ENGLISH  73 

formed  state;  writers  and  speakers  with  a 
whole  world  of  new  thoughts  to  express, 
reached  out  eagerly  and  uncritically  to  every 
source  from  which  they  could  derive  means 
of  expression — "ink-horn"  terms,  strange 
coinages,  pedantic  borrowings,  fashions  and 
affectations,  were  mingled  with  archaisms 
and  sham  antiques;  while  the  needs  of  popu- 
lar preaching  and  discussion  brought  into 
common  and  even  literary  use  many  collo- 
quialisms and  homely  old  Saxon  words. 

The  result  was  a  language  of  unsurpassed 
richness  and  beauty,  which,  however,  defies 
all  rules.  To  the  Elizabethans  it  seemed  as 
if  almost  any  word  could  be  used  in  any 
grammatical  relation — adverbs  for  verbs,  for 
nouns  or  adjectives,  nouns  and  adjectives  for 
verbs  and  adverbs.  Thus,  as  Dr.  Abbot  points 
out  in  his  Shakespearian  Grammar ^  "You 
can  happy  your  friend,  malice  or  foot  your 
enemy,  or  fall  an  axe  on  his  neck."  A  he 
is  used  for  a  man,  a  she  for  a  woman,  and 
every  variety  of  what  is  now  considered  bad 
grammar — ^plural  nominatives  with  singular 
verbs,  double  negatives,  double  comparatives 
{more  better ^  etc.),  are  commonly  employed. 


T4         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

The  end  of  this  period  of  Tudor  English 
and  the  beginning  of  modern  English  coincides 
with  the  appearance  of  a  Revised  Version 
of  the  English  Bible,  published  in  1611.  In 
the  earlier  part  of  the  XVIIth  Century  the 
borrowing  of  learned  words,  especially  from 
the  Latin,  though  now  also  to  a  certain  ex- 
tent direct  from  the  Greek,  went  on  apace. 
Indeed,  by  now  the  English  had  adopted  far 
more  new  material  than  it  could  assimilate; 
and  at  the  Restoration,  when  a  new  ideal  of 
language  prevailed,  and  speech  tended  more 
towards  the  easy  elegance  of  a  cultivated  man 
of  fashion,  the  vocabulary  was  sifted,  and 
many  of  these  cumbrous  and  tremendous 
terms  of  XVIth  and  XVIIth  Century  thought 
and  theology  fell  into  disuse. 

With  the  Restoration  also  came  a  new 
wave  of  French  influence.  Charies  11  and 
his  Court  had  Hved  long  in  France;  French 
fashions  were  supreme  at  the  English  Court, 
polite  speech  and  literature  was  once  more 
fitted  with  French  expressions;  and  it  became 
now,  as  we  have  seen,  the  custom  not  to 
naturalize  these  borrowed  words,  but  to 
preserve  as  much  as  possible  their  native 


MODERN  ENGLISH  75 

pronunciation.  The  structure  of  the  EngHsh 
sentence,  moreover,  was  modified  owing  to 
French  influence;  and  the  stately  and  splen- 
did old  English  prose,  with  its  rolling  sen- 
tences and  involved  clauses  of  dogmatic 
assertion  or  inspired  metaphor,  gave  place  to 
a  more  and  more  concise,  easy,  and  limpid 
statement,  without  the  eagle-high  flights  of 
the  old  English,  but  also  without  its  cumber- 
someness,  awkwardness,  and  obscurity.  With 
the  learned  Latin  words  that  were  now  dis- 
carded, many  old  English  terms  fell  into  dis- 
use, and  the  English  language  in  the  XVLEIth 
Century  suffered  something  of  the  same 
**piu*ification"  or  impoverishment  which  in 
the  XVIIth  Century  reduced  the  literary 
vocabulary  of  French  by  an  enormous  number 
of  native  words. 

With  the  Romantic  Movement,  however, 
at  the  end  of  the  XVLEIth  and  the  beginning 
of  the  XlXth  Century,  and  with  also  the 
increased  historical  sense  and  interest  in  the 
past,  many  of  these  old  words  were  revived; 
and  we  are  probably  now  much  nearer  to 
Chaucer,  not  only  in  our  understanding  of 
his  age,  but  also  in  our  comprehension  of  his 


76         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

language,  than  our  ancestors  were  at  the 
time  when  Dryden  and  his  contemporaries 
found  it  almost  incomprehensible  without 
special  study.  Indeed,  the  fifty  years  between 
the  death  of  Shakespeare  and  the  Restoration 
created  a  much  wider  gulf  between  the 
courtiers  of  Charles  II  and  those  of  EUzabeth 
than  the  three  hundred  years  which  divide  us 
from  that  period,  and  Shakespeare  and  Spenser 
are  much  more  easily  comprehended  by  us 
than  by  the  men  of  letters  who  were  bom  not 
many  years  after  the  death  of  these  great  poets. 
Besides  the  shifting  of  the  English  vocabu- 
lary and  the  extinction  of  superfluous  words, 
another  and  more  subtle  process  has  been 
steadily  going  on,  and  has  done  much  to  enrich 
our  language.  Owing  to  its  varied  sources 
our  language  was,  as  we  have  seen,  provided 
with  a  great  number  of  synonyms — words 
of  different  form,  but  expressing  the  same 
meaning.  But  this  superfluity  of  terms  was 
soon  turned  to  a  good  use  by  the  ever  vigilant 
Genius  of  the  Language;  little  by  httle 
slightly  different  meanings  began  to  attach 
themselves  to  these  different  words;  each 
gradually   asserted    for   itself    its   separate 


MODERN  ENGLISH  77 

sphere  of  expression,  from  which  the  others 
were  excluded;  until  often  two  words  which 
could  originally  be  used  indifferently  have 
come  to  have  quite  separate  and  distinct 
meanings.  This  differentiation,  or,  as  it  is 
called,  "desynonymization,"  of  words  is  most 
plainly  seen  where  two  words,  one  from  a 
Saxon  and  one  from  a  Latin  or  Greek  source, 
have  begun  with  identical  meanings,  but  have 
gradually  diverged,  as  pastor  and  shepherdy 
foresight  and  providence,  boyish  and  puerile, 
homicide  and  murder.  Often,  however,  the 
two  words  are  derived  from  the  same  language, 
as  ingenuous  and  ingenious,  invent  and  dis- 
cover, astrology  and  astronomy,  and  many 
others.  Or  one  word  with  two  different 
spellings,  both  of  which  were  used  indifferently, 
has  become  two  distinct  words,  each  of  which 
appropriates  a  part  of  the  original  meaning. 
Thus  our  word  human  was  generally  spelt 
humane  till  the  beginning  of  the  XVIIIth 
Century,  though  human  occasionally  ap- 
peared. Then,  however,  the  distinction 
between  what  men  are,  and  what  they  ought 
to  be,  arose,  and  human  was  adopted  for  the 
first,  and  the  old  spelling  humane  for  the  other 


78         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

idea.  So  divers  and  diverse  were  originally  the 
same  word,  and  not  distinguished  in  spelHng 
till  the  XVIIth  Century;  and  the  distinc- 
tions between  corps  and  corpsey  cloths  and 
clothes,  flour  and  flower  were  not  established 
before  quite  modem  times. 

These  are  obvious  distinctions,  which  we 
can  all  understand  at  once,  although  the  exact 
process  which  produces  them  remains,  like 
so  much  in  language,  somewhat  mysterious 
and  unknown.  But,  as  we  have  seen  in  the 
development  of  grammatical  distinctions,  the 
Genius  of  the  Language  is  often  extremely 
subtle  and  delicate  in  its  analysis,  so  subtle 
that  although  we  feel  instinctively  the  dis- 
criminations that  it  makes,  we  cannot,  with- 
out some  efiFort,  understand  the  distinctions  of 
thought  on  which  they  are  based.  Often,  in- 
deed, our  usage  will  be  right  when  the  reason 
we  give  for  it  is  entirely  mistaken.  The 
human  mind,  half-consciously  aware  of  in- 
finite shades  of  thought  and  feeling  which  it 
wishes  to  express,  chooses  with  admirable 
discrimination,  though  by  no  deliberate  act, 
among  the  materials  provided  for  it  by  his- 
torical causes  or  mere  accidents  of  spelling. 


MODERN  ENGLISH  79 

differing  forms  to  express  its  inner  meaning; 
stamps  them  with  the  pecuHar  shade  it  wishes 
to  express,  and  uses  them  for  its  deHcate  pur- 
poses; and  thus  with  admirable  but  unfore- 
seen design,  finds  a  beautiful  and  appropriate 
and  subtle  clothing  for  its  thought.  To  take  a 
simple  instance  of  these  distinctions  in  the  use 
of  words,  we  would  all  speak  of  riding  in  an 
omnibus,  a  tramcar,  or  a  farmer's  cart,  in 
which  we  were  given  a  lift  on  the  road,  but 
of  driving  in  a  cab  or  carriage  which  we  own 
or  hire;  many  of  us  would  not,  however,  be 
aware  that  the  distinction  we  make  between 
the  two  words  is  really  due  to  the  sense  that 
in  the  case  of  the  omnibus  or  farmer's  cart 
the  vehicle  is  not  under  our  own  control, 
while  the  cab  or  carriage  is.  So  also  in  modern 
standard  English  (though  not  in  the  English 
of  the  United  States)  a  distinction  which  we 
feel,  but  many  of  us  could  not  define,  is  made 
between  forward  and  forwards;  forwards  being 
used  in  definite  contrast  to  any  other  direction, 
as  "if  you  move  at  all,  you  can  only  move 
forwards,"  while  forward  is  used  where  no 
such  contrast  is  implied,  as  in  the  common 
phrase  "to  bring  a  matter  forward." 


80         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Distinctions  and  nice  discriminations  of 
this  kind  are  continually  arising  and  attempt- 
ing to  establish  themselves  in  the  language, 
and  we  can  all  witness  now  the  struggle  going 
on  to  define  the  usages  of  the  three  adjectives 
Scots,  Scottishy  and  Scotch.  Another  distinc- 
tion now  tending  to  establish  itself  is  between 
the  terminations  of  agent-nouns  in  er  and  or. 
We  speak  of  sailoTy  but  of  a  boat  being  a 
good  sailer;  of  a  respecter  of  persons,  but  an 
inspector  of  nuisances;  or  a  projector y  and 
the  rejecter  who  opposes  him.  Here,  again, 
the  distinction  is  a  somewhat  subtle  one,  the 
agent-noun  in  or  implying  a  trade  or  profes- 
sion or  habitual  function,  while  that  in  er  has 
no  such  special  meaning.  It  is  in  instances  of 
this  kind,  in  the  variations  of  our  own  speech, 
and  that  of  others,  that  the  study  of  words 
enables  us  to  observe  in  httle  the  processes 
and  somewhat  mysterious  workings  of  those 
forces  to  which  are  due  the  perpetual  change 
and  development  of  national  ways  and  usages 
and  institutions. 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH        81 


CHAPTER  IV 

WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH 

It  is  not  merely  by  borrowing  from  abroad, 
or  by  discriminations  between  abeady  exist- 
ing words,  that  our  vocabulary  is  increased. 
New  words  can  easily  be  created  in  English, 
and  are  being  created  almost  every  day;  and 
a  large  part  of  our  speech  is  made  up  of  terms 
we  have  formed  for  ourselves  out  of  old  and 
famihar  material.  One  of  the  simplest  ways 
of  forming  a  new  word  is  that  of  making  com- 
pounds, the  joining  together  of  two  or  more 
separate  terms  to  make  a  third.  This  method 
of  making  words  was  very  commonly  em- 
ployed in  Greek,  but  was  rare  in  classical  Latin, 
as  it  is  rare  in  French.  In  German  it  is  ex- 
tremely common,  where  almost  any  words  can 
be  joined  together,  and  compounds  are  formed, 
often  of  enormous  length.  In  the  facility  of 
forming  compounds,  English  stands  between 
the  French  and  German;  the  richness  of  old 
English  in  this  respect  has  been  modified  by 


82  THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

French  and  Latin  influence;  and  here,  as  in 
vocabulary,  EngHsh  is  partly  Teutonic  and 
partly  French.  The  most  common  of  our 
English  compounds  are  those  in  which  two 
nouns  are  joined  together,  the  second  express- 
ing a  general  meaning,  which  is  somehow 
modified  or  limited  by  the  first.  Thus,  to  take 
modern  instances,  a  railway  is  a  way  formed 
by  rails,  a  steamboat  is  a  boat  propelled  by 
steam,  a  school  board  is  a  board  which  controls 
schools,  a  board  school  is  one  of  the  schools 
managed  by  that  board.  Words  compounded 
in  this  way  preserve  for  a  while  the  sense  of 
their  separate  existence;  soon,  however,  they 
come  to  be  spelt  with  a  hyphen,  like  lavm- 
tennis  or  motor-car,  and  before  long  they  are 
joined  into  one  word  like  rainfall  or  goldfield; 
and  sometimes  we  cease  to  think  of  them  as 
compounds  at  all,  and  the  form  of  one  or  other 
of  the  words  is  forgotten  and  transformed,  as 
day's  eye  has  become  daisy y  and  Christ* s  mass 
Christmas, 

But  compounds  can  be  formed  by  joining 
together  almost  any  parts  of  speech,  and 
sometimes  more  than  two  words  are  combined 
in  a  compound,  as  in  the  old  hop-o'-my-thumb ^ 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH       83 

and  in  the  XlXth  Century  rough-and-ready , 
hard-and-fast,  daddy-long-legs.  We  have  also 
in  English  a  curious  kind  of  compound  verb, 
where  an  adverb  is  used  with  a  verb  without 
actual  union,  as  to  give  up,  to  break  out,  etc. 
In  this  kind  of  formation  the  XlXth  Century 
was  especially  rich,  and  gave  birth  to  many 
such  modern  expressions  as  to  boil  down,  to  go 
under,  to  hang  on,  to  back  down,  to  own  up,  to 
take  over,  to  run  aci'oss.  Verbs  of  this  kind, 
though  often  colloquial,  add  an  idiomatic 
power  to  the  language,  and  enable  it  to  ex- 
press many  fine  distinctions  of  thought  and 
meaning. 

On  the  whole,  however,  the  formation  of 
new  compounds  is  not  of  enormous  impor- 
tance to  modern  English;  and  the  language 
has  certainly  lost  some  of  its  original  power  in 
this  respect.  Compounds,  moreover,  tend  to 
die  out  more  quickly  than  other  words;  the 
Genius  of  the  Language  seems  to  prefer  a 
simple  term  for  a  simple  notion;  and  a  word 
made  up  of  two  others,  each  of  which  vividly 
suggests  a  separate  idea,  is  apt  to  seem  awk- 
ward to  us  unless  we  can  conveniently  forget 
the   original   meanings.      Word-composition 


84         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

really  belongs  to  an  earlier  stage  of  language, 
where  the  object  of  speech  was  to  appeal  to 
the  imagination  and  feelings  rather  than  to 
the  intellect;  and  we  find,  perhaps,  the  most 
vivid  and  idiomatic  of  EngKsh  compounds  in 
words  of  abuse  and  contempt  like  licksjnttley 
skinflint,  stoiUpoU  spitfire.  The  excitement  of 
passion  heats  more  readily  than  anything  else 
the  crucible  of  language  in  which  is  fused, 
ready  for  coining,  the  material  for  new  words; 
and  the  abusive  epithets  of  a  language  are 
always  among  its  most  picturesque  and  most 
imaginative  words. 

For  the  poets  also,  who,  like  the  vitupera- 
tors,  make  their  appeal  to  feeling  and  imagina- 
tion, this  method  of  making  words  is  most 
valuable;  and,  being  allowed  great  freedom 
in  this  respect,  they  have,  by  their  beautiful 
and  audacious  compounds,  added  some  of  the 
most  exquisite  and  expressive  phrases  to  the 
English  language.  Chaucer  and  the  earHer 
poets  hardly  employed  this  method  of  coining 
epithets;  but  with  the  influence  of  the  classi- 
cal renaissance,  and  the  translations  from 
Homer  and  the  Greek  poets,  whose  works  are 
so  rich  in  compound  epithets,  this  method  of 


WORD-MAKING  m  ENGLISH       85 

expression  was  largely  adopted,  and  has  added 
to  the  language  many  compound  adjectives 
which  are  little  poems  in  themselves — Shake- 
speare's young-eyed  cherubims,  for  instance,  or 
Milton's  grey-hooded  even,  or  coral-paven  floor. 
The  commonest  way  of  making  new  words 
is  by  what  is  called  derivation.  We  are  all 
familiar  with  this  method  by  which  a  prefix 
or  suffix  is  added  to  an  already  existing  word, 
as  coolness  is  formed  by  adding  the  suffix  ness 
to  cooly  or  in  distrust  dis  is  prefixed  to  trust. 
Many  of  these  affixes  we  know  to  have  been 
originally  separate  words,  as  dorrii  in  freedom, 
kingdom,  etc.,  represents  the  Anglo-Saxon 
ddm,  "statute,  jurisdiction,"  and  kood  in  child- 
hood, 'priesthood,  etc.,  is  derived  from  the 
Anglo-Saxon  hdd,  meaning  "person,"  "qual- 
ity," or  "rank."  Our  affixes,  however,  are  no 
longer  words  by  themselves,  but  carriers  of 
general  ideas,  which  we  add  to  words  to 
modify  their  meaning.  Thus,  if  we  take  the 
old  EngKsh  word  cloud,  we  find  a  verb  formed 
from  it,  to  becloud,  adjectives  in  cloudy,  cloud- 
ing, clouded,  an  adverb  in  cloudily,  a  sub- 
stantive in  clouding,  an  abstract  noun  in 
cloudiness,  and  a  diminutive  in  cloudlet.    Or 


86         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

if  a  word  like  critic  is  borrowed,  and  finds  a 
soil  favourable  to  its  development,  it  soon 
puts  forth  various  parts  of  speech,  an  adjec- 
tive critical^  an  adverb  critically,  substantives 
abstract  and  concrete,  in  criiicalness  and 
criticism,  and  a  verb  in  criticize,  which  in  its 
turn  begets  a  noun  and  adjective  in  criticizing, 
and  another  agent-noun  in  criticizer. 

A  full  list  of  the  affixes  in  English  wiU 
be  found  in  any  book  of  English  philology  or 
grammar,  with  their  history  and  the  rules, 
as  far  as  there  are  definite  rules,  for  their 
correct  usage.  They  can  be  divided  into 
two  classes — those  of  native  and  those  of 
foreign  origin.  The  most  ancient  of  our 
derivative  words,  the  small  handful  from  the 
rich  Anglo-Saxon  vocabulary  which  has  sur- 
vived, are  all,  of  course,  formed  from  native 
affixes,  and  many  of  these  affixes,  ness,  less, 
fvl,  ly,  y,  etc.,  are  still  in  living  use.  But 
when  in  the  XHIth  Century  a  large  number 
of  French  words  were  borrowed,  a  great  many 
of  these  brought  with  them  their  derivatives, 
formed  on  French  or  Latin  models,  and,  as 
Mr.  Bradley  says,  "when  such  pairs  of  words 
as  derive  and  derivation,  esteem  and  estimation. 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH       87 

lavd  and  laudation,  condemn  and  condemna- 
tion,  had  found  their  way  into  the  Enghsh 
vocabulary,  it  was  natural  the  suffix  ation 
should  be  recognized  by  English  speakers  as 
an  allowable  means  of  forming  *  nouns  of 
action*  out  of  verbs."  In  this  way  a  large 
part  of  the  French  machinery  of  derivation 
has  been  naturalized  in  English — we  freely 
form  other  nouns  in  age  (porterage,  etc.);  in 
ment  (acknowledgment,  amazement,  atonement) ; 
in  ery  (bakery,  brewery,  etc.).  We  form 
adjectives,  too,  in  al,  ous,  ose,  ese,  ary,  able, 
etc.;  verbs  in  Jy,  ate,  ize,  and  ish.  These 
French  suffixes  are  for  the  most  part  derived 
from  the  Latin;  ard,  however,  in  coward,  etc., 
and  esque  in  picturesque,  came  into  French 
from  a  German  source;  ade,  in  arcade,  balus- 
trade, crusade,  is  from  the  Spanish  or  Italian; 
while  ism,  ize,  ic,  and  the  feminine  suffix  ess 
are  ultimately  derived  through  Latin  from  the 
Greek. 

It  is  often  maintained  by  the  purists  of 
language  that  these  borrowed  affixes  should 
only  be  used  for  foreign  words,  that  for  our 
own  native  words  only  our  native  machinery 
should   be   employed.     Letters   continually 


88         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

appear  in  the  newspapers  denouncing  this 
or  that  new  fonnation  as  a  hybrid,  and 
begging  all  respectable  people  to  help  in 
casting  it  out  from  the  language.  There 
is,  no  doubt,  a  certain  truth  in  the  point 
of  view;  and  the  linguistic  sense  of  all  of  us 
would  be  rightly  shocked  by  such  an  adjective 
asfishic  or  fishous  for  fishy,  or  such  a  noun  as 
dampment  for  dampness.  But  a  little  examina- 
tion of  the  linguistic  usage  will  show  that  no 
such  rule  can  be  absolutely  enforced.  Latin 
borrowed  Greek  affixes,  French  borrowed 
them  from  German,  and  freely  used  them  in 
forming  new  French  words;  many  of  our 
noblest  old  Enghsh  words,  as  atonement^ 
amazement,  forhearance,fulfilment,  goddess,  etc., 
are  formed  by  adding  foreign  suffixes  to  Eng- 
lish words;  while  English  suffixes  have  been 
freely  added  to  foreign  words,  as/t^Z  in  beautv- 
ftd,  gratefid,  gracefid.  And  when  we  wish  to 
form  a  noun  out  of  French  or  Latin  adjectives 
ending  in  ous,  we  generally  employ  our  native 
ness  for  the  purpose,  as  in  consciousness, 
coveUmsness,  etc.  The  foreign  prefix  re  has 
been  completely  naturalized,  and  used  again 
and  again  with  native  words,  and  the  modem 


WORD-MAKING  m  ENGLISH       89 

anti  and  pro  are  added  to  English  words  with 
little  consideration  of  their  foreign  birth,  and 
one  of  our  suffixes,  ical,  is  itself  a  hybrid,  com- 
bined out  of  Greek  and  Latin  elements.  The 
estabhshed  usage  of  the  language,  stated  in 
general  terms,  seems  to  be  that  foreign 
affixes,  that  have  no  equivalent  in  English, 
are  often  thoroughly  naturaHzed  and  used 
with  English  words;  and  that  this,  too,  some- 
times happens  when  the  foreign  affix  is  simpler 
and  more  convenient  than  our  native  one, 
as  the  Latin  re  has  replaced  the  old  again, 
which  we  find  in  the  old  verb  to  again-huy  and 
other  similar  words.  When,  also,  borrowed 
words  have  become  thoroughly  naturaHzed 
and  popular,  and  they  are  then  treated  as  if 
they  were  natives — cream,  for  instance,  comes 
to  us  ultimately  from  the  Greek,  but  it  has 
been  so  long  at  home,  and  seems  so  like  an 
old  English  word,  that  it  would  be  insuffer- 
able pedantry  to  form  an  adjective  Hke 
creamic  from  it.  So  the  correct  incertairiy  in- 
grateful,  Ulimited,  have  been  replaced  by  the 
hybrids  uncertain,  ungrateful,  unlimited,  and 
schemer  has  taken  the  place  of  the  older  and 
more  correct  schemist.    On  the  other  hand. 


90         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

where  words  are  obviously  foreign  in  charac- 
ter, we  can  note  a  tendency,  which  has  been 
at  work  for  the  last  two  or  three  centuries,  to 
prefer  what  is  called  "Hnguistic  harmony"; 
to  choose,  among  two  competing  forms,  the 
one  which  is  homogeneous  throughout.  Thus, 
in  Wyclif's  words  unscUiabley  ungloriouSy 
undiscreet,  the  native  un  has  been  replaced  by 
the  Latin  in;  unpossible  is  used  in  the  Bible 
of  1611,  but  has  been  changed  to  impossible  in 
later  editions;  while  old  hybrids  like  frailness, 
gaynesSy  scepticalness,  cruelness  have  given 
way  to  the  more  correct,  and  generally  more 
modem  forms,  frailti/y  gaietyy  scepticism, 
cruelty.  This  change  has  been  rightly  claimed 
as  an  instance  of  the  unconscious  exercise  of 
a  linguistic  instinct  by  the  English  people;  it 
has  not  been  brought  about  by  the  efiForts  of 
learned  men,  but  by  the  choice  of  the  people 
at  large,  and  is  one  of  the  manifestations  of 
the  Genius  of  the  Language,  which,  in  its 
capricious  way,  dislikes  at  times  the  incon- 
gruity in  words  composed  of  diverse  elements. 
This  tendency,  with  the  modem  and  more 
diffused  study  of  language,  has  grown  stronger 
in  the  XlXth  Century,  and  with  the  exception 


WORD-MAEING  IN  ENGLISH       91 

of  thoroughly  naturalized  affixes  like  al,  ize, 
ism,  ist,  etc.,  new  hybrids,  unless  very  con- 
venient and  expressive,  find  it  hard  to  with- 
stand the  hostile  and  often  furious  abuse  and 
opposition  which  awaits  them.  Since,  how- 
ever, such  words  abound  in  languages  like 
late  Latin  and  French,  on  which  so  much 
of  English  is  modelled,  and  since  many  of  our 
most  beautiful  old  words  are  hybrids,  and 
there  was,  indeed,  no  objection  to  them  in  the 
greatest  periods  of  English,  and  our  great 
poets  and  writers  like  Shakespeare  and 
Milton  have  freely  coined  them,  it  is  possible 
that  a  wider  knowledge  of  the  history  of  the 
language  will  modify  this  feeling,  and  they 
will  in  the  future  be  judged,  not  by  abstract 
principles,  but  each  one  on  its  merits. 

Another  curious  thing  about  these  affixes, 
due  to  the  inscrutable  working  of  the  Genius 
of  the  Language,  is  the  way  in  which  some 
of  them  Hve  and  remain  productive,  while 
others,  for  some  mysterious  reason,  fall  into 
disuse  and  perish.  Tk,  for  instance,  which 
was  so  freely  employed  to  form  nouns,  as  in 
health,  wealth,  etc.,  is  no  longer  employed, 
though  growth  was  formed  as  late  as  the  time 


92         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

of  Shakespeare;  and  Horace  Walpole's 
greenth  or  Ruskin's  iUth  could  never  have  had 
the  least  chance  of  acceptance.  So,  too,  the 
prefix  for  (corresponding  to  the  still  active 
German  ver)  which  we  find  in  so  many  old 
words  hke  forbid,  forgo,  forgive,  forlorn,  is  now, 
in  spite  of  its  great  usefulness,  quite  obsolete; 
and  if  we  take  many  of  our  oldest  suffixes 
such  as  dom,  ship,  some,  etc.,  we  shaU  find,  as 
we  approach  more  modem  times,  that  they 
are  more  and  more  falling  into  disuse.  Old 
words  can  be,  and  often  are  revived,  but  when 
an  affix  perishes  it  seems  as  if  no  efiFort  can 
restore  to  it  its  old  life.  Which,  then,  of  these 
instruments  of  verbal  machinery  are  still 
living?  A  collection  of  the  most  important 
XlXth  Century  coinages  will  show  that  out  of 
our  great  wealth  of  native  suffixes  but  a  few 
are  still  active,  while  almost  all  our  good  old 
prefixes  have  fallen  out  of  use.  Y  is  still, 
of  course,  used,  as  in  such  modem  words  as 
plucky,  prosy;  we  still  form  adverbs  with  ly, 
as  brilliantly,  enjoyably,  and  adjectives  in  less 
or  ful  or  ish  or  ing,  as  companionless,  and 
tactful,  and  amateurish,  exciting,  appalling, 
etc.   The  most  living  of  all  oui  native  suffixes 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH       93 

is  the  old  ness  for  abstract  nouns;  boastfulness, 
blandness,  absent-mindednessy  are  all  XlXth 
Century  words,  and  ness  has  also  been  freely 
added  to  words  of  Latin  origin,  as  astutenessy 
sainiliness.  This  suflfix  has  almost  entirely 
taken  the  place  of  ship^  as  gladness  for  glad- 
ship,  cleanness  for  cleanship;  and  shipy  which 
has  given  us  such  beautiful  words  in  the  past 
as  friendshipy  worship,  felhwshipy  is  almost 
dead  now,  chairmanship  being,  perhaps,  the 
only  current  word  formed  from  it  in  the 
XlXth  Century.  Ness  has  also  replaced 
head  or  hood  in  many  words,  and  also  dom;  for 
the  XlXth  Century  attempts  to  revive  doviy 
as  in  Carlyle's  duncedoMy  dupedoMy  have  not, 
with  the  exception  of  boredoniy  met  with  any 
permanent  or  popular  success. 

The  Latin  suflSxes  in  EngUsh  show  much 
more  vitality.  Probably  the  most  common  of 
them  in  XlXth  Century  formations  is  the  use 
of  the  sufl^  at  for  forming  adjectives  or  nouns. 
Preferentialy  exceptionaly  medievaly  are,  with 
many  others,  XlXth  Century  words;  phe- 
nomenal is  a  hybrid  of  Greek  and  Latin,  and 
the  nouns  betrothal  and  betrayal  are  com- 
pounds of  Latin  and  English.    Other  adjec- 


94         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

tives  are  freely  formed  with  ous,  as  malarums, 
hilarious,  flirtatious;  with  ive,  as  competitive, 
introspective;  less  frequently  with  ary,  as 
documentary  and  rudimentary.  Ation  and 
meat  are  the  commonest  Latin  suffixes  for 
forming  nouns,  as  centralization,  mystifica- 
tion, enactment,  bewilderment,  and  there  are 
many  new  nouns  ending  in  ability  as  conceiva- 
bUity,  reliability,  etc.  The  Latin  prefix  re 
is  employed  more  than  ever;  muUi,  which  was 
not  common  till  the  middle  of  the  XVIIth 
Century,  is  much  used  now;  counter  is  also 
living;  intra  has  become  popular,  pre  and  non 
are  much  used,  and  quite  recently  pro  as  a 
prefix  has  sprung  into  sudden  popularity,  as 
in  pro-Boer,  pro-Russian,  etc.  There  is  no 
precedent  or  analogy  in  Latin  for  this  use  of 
pro,  meaning  "in  favour  of";  it  seems  to  have 
arisen  from  the  phrase  pro  and  con;  we  find  it 
first  in  pro-slavery  about  1825,  but  it  was  rare 
until  about  1896,  since  when,  however,  it 
has  abounded  in  the  newspapers  as  a  useful 
antithesis  to  the  popular  anti.  The  French 
age,  as  in  breakage,  cleavage,  acreage;  and 
esque,  derived  through  French  from  the  Teu- 
tonic ish,  and  used  in  such  words  as  Dan- 


WORD-MAEING  IN  ENGLISH       95 

tesque,  Romanesquey  are  still  living.  But  by  far 
the  most  active  of  our  affixes  are  Greek  in 
origin.  The  suffixes  ic,  ism,  ist,  istic  and  izey 
and  crat  and  craqj,  are  fairly  modem  addi- 
tions to  the  language,  and  obviously  suited  to 
the  XlXth  Century,  with  its  development  of 
abstract  thought,  and  its  gigantic  growth  of 
theories,  creeds,  doctrines,  systems.  With 
them  also,  to  differentiate  more  nicely  be- 
tween various  shades  of  thought,  we  find, 
principally  in  the  XlXth  Century,  a  great 
use  is  also  made  of  Greek  prefixes  like  hyper, 
pseudo,  archly  neo,  besides  a  great  number  of 
prefixes  used  in  more  strictly  scientific  terms 
like  dia,  meta,  proto,  etc.  Of  all  these  ism  is 
the  most  productive;  it  came  to  us  through 
the  French,  who  had  adopted  it  from  Latin; 
and  as  early  as  1300  a  few  words  from  the 
French,  like  baptism,  make  their  appearance 
in  EngKsh.  By  the  XVIth  Century  ism  be- 
came a  hving  element  in  our  language;  and 
since  then  it  has  rapidly  grown  in  popularity, 
until  in  the  XlXth  Century  more  new  words 
were  formed  from  it  than  from  any  other 
affix,  and  practically  all  the  old  English 
suffixes  once  used    in  its  place  have,  with 


96         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

the  exception  of  nessy  been  swallowed  up  and 
superseded  by  it.  It  is  now  used,  not  only 
in  modem  words  of  Greek  origin,  like  hypno- 
tism,  and  still  more  in  Latin  words  like  pauper" 
ism,  conservatism,  commercialism,  but  also 
for  words  from  other  sources,  as  feudalism, 
Brahminism,  etc.  This  is  also  true  of  agent- 
nouns  in  ist  (as  in  the  XlXth  Century  scien- 
tist, opportunist,  collectivist);  of  adjectives  in 
ic  {Byronic,  idyllic,  etc.),  and  of  verbs  in  ize, 
as  minimize,  bowdlerize,  and  many  others. 
The  XVIIth  Century  gave  us  one  or  two 
instances  of  curious  hybrid  verbs  formed  with 
the  Latin  prefix  de  and  the  Greek  suffix  ize, 
as  decanonize,  decardinalize;  but  since  the 
period  of  the  French  Revolution  gave  birth 
to  the  verb  demoralize,  words  of  this  formation 
have  become  extremely  popular  in  French 
and  English,  and  our  modern  vocabulary 
abounds  in  verbs  like  dechristianize,  decen- 
tralize, deodorize,  demagnetize,  etc. 

This  short  account  of  the  decay  of  our 
English  methods  of  word-formation,  and  the 
invasion  of  foreign  affixes,  which  seem,  like 
the  foreign  weeds  in  English  rivers,  to  be 
checking  our  native  growths,  can  hardly  be 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH       97 

very  cheerful  reading  for  a  lover  of  the  old 
English  language;  and  he  cannot  but  regret 
the  disappearance  of  many  of  those  vivid 
syllables  to  which  we  owe  in  the  past  so  many 
of  our  most  expressive  words.  But  as  else- 
where in  modern  language,  where  reason  and 
imagination  are  at  war,  imagination  must  give 
way  to  the  claims  of  the  intellect.  Modern 
language  is  for  purposes  of  use,  not  beauty, 
and  these  abstract  terms  in  ism,  ist,  and  ize, 
dull  and  dreary  and  impossible  for  his  pur- 
poses as  the  poet  finds  them,  are  yet  indis- 
pensable for  the  hard  thinking  of  science,  and 
of  social  and  political  theory. 

There  are  other  ways  of  forming  new  words, 
not  by  addition,  but  by  taking  away  one  or 
more  of  the  syllables  or  letters  of  which  they 
are  composed.  One  of  these  processes  is  by 
what  is  called  "back-formations."  Some- 
times a  word  has  a  false  appearance  of  ending 
with  a  well-known  suffix,  and,  to  those  igno- 
rant of  its  character,  seems  to  imply  the  ex- 
istence of  an  original  word  from  which  it  has 
been  formed.  Thus  the  old  adverb  darkling 
seems  like  an  adjective  formed  on  a  supposed 
verb  to  darkle,  and  from  this  supposition  such 


98         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

a  verb  arose.  Husht,  which  was  originally  an 
exclamation  like  whist!  seemed  to  imply,  and 
therefore  gave  rise  to,  a  verb  to  hush;  and  the 
old  singulars  pease,  cherise,  skates,  being 
regarded  as  plurals,  have  begotten  new  sin- 
gulars in  pea,  cherry,  and  skate. 

We  are  all  familiar  with  the  process  called 
"shortening,"  by  which  words  much  used  in 
conversation  and  hurried  speech  are  clipped 
of  one  or  more  of  their  syllables;  though  we 
are  probably  not  all  of  us  aware  of  how  much 
the  English  vocabulary  has  been  enriched  in 
this  way.  But  to  the  process  which  has  given 
us  in  recent  times  such  words  as  cah,  photo, 
cycle,  bus,  we  owe  the  older  words  size,  from 
assize,  sport,  from  disport;  and  the  dignified 
consols,  from  consolidated  annuities,  has  lost 
almost  all  traces  of  the  mutilation  which  it 
has  so  recently  undergone. 

Names  of  places  are  also  a  fruitful  source 
of  new  words,  for  the  Genius  of  the  Language, 
when  it  has  a  gap  in  its  vocabulary  to  fill,  is 
apt  to  seize  on  any  material  ready  to  its  hand. 
Worsted  is  from  Worstead,  a  village  near 
Norwich,  and  canter  is,  of  course,  an  abbrevia- 
tion of  Canterbury.    Persons  also  have  some- 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH       99 

times  the  good  or  bad  luck  to  add  their  names 
to  the  language.  Tawdry  is  from  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  Saint  Audrey,  who  was  famous  for  her 
splendid  attire;  the  names  of  an  English  earl 
and  a  Scotch  murderer  are  preserved  in 
sandwich^  and  the  verb  to  burke;  and  the 
Enghsh  word  which  in  recent  times  has  been 
most  widely  adopted  into  other  languages  is 
from  the  patronymic  of  an  Irish  landlord. 
Captain  Boycott.  From  fictitious  characters 
come  quixotic,  dryasdust,  the  verbs  to  hector 
and  to  pander,  while  pamphlet  is  from  the 
name  of  a  character  in  a  Xllth  Century 
comedy. 

But  many  of  our  commonest  and  most 
familiar  terms  cannot  be  explained  by  any  of 
the  above  methods,  and  have,  as  far  as  is 
known,  no  etymology  in  the  true  sense  of  the 
word.  This  history  of  all  Hving  languages 
shows  the  continual  appearance  of  new  terms, 
which  cannot  be  traced  to  any  familiar  root 
or  previously  existing  formation.  Among 
words  of  this  kind  which  appear  in  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  period  are  dog  and  curse;  while  such 
common  words  as  girl  and  boy,  lad  and  lass, 
pig,  and  fog  and  cut  appear  in  the  Xlllth  and 


100        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

XTVth  Centuries.  Bet  and  jump  and  dodge 
are  not  found  before  the  XVIth  Century, 
while  the  XVIIIth  Century  saw  the  app>ear- 
ance  of  capsize,  donkey,  bore,  and  many  others. 
None  of  these  words  can  be  traced  with  any 
certainty  to  words  of  previous  formation.  In 
the  XlXth  Century  roUiching  and  the  verb 
to  loaj  have  appeared  in  England,  while 
rowdy,  bogus,  boom,  and  blizzard  are  of  equally 
obscure  American  formation.  The  same  pro- 
cess has  been  going  on  in  foreign  languages, , 
and  many  of  our  words  of  this  class  are  bor- 
rowed from  abroad.  Risk  and  brave  and 
bronze  seem  to  be  of  Italian  origin,  wlojle  flute, 
frown,  and  gorgeous,  and  the  XlXth  Century 
rococo  have  apparently  arisen  on  French  soil. 
These  new  words  were  a  considerable 
diflSculty  to  the  older  philologists,  who  be- 
heved  that  all  new  words  were  descended 
from  ancient  roots,  formed  in  times  beyond 
the  ken  of  history,  when  our  ancestors  pos- 
sessed the  root-creating  faculty — a  pure  pro- 
ductive energy,  which  their  descendants,  it 
was  believed,  had  long  since  lost.  It  is  one 
of  the  discoveries,  however,  of  more  recent 
philology  that  this  faculty  is  by  no  means  lost; 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH      101 

that  wherever  language  finds  itself  in  its 
natural  state,  new  words  appear — words 
which  have  all  the  character  of  fresh-created 
roots,  and  which  soon  take  their  place  side  by 
side  with  terms  of  long  descent,  and  are  used, 
like  them,  for  the  formation  of  derivatives  and 
compounds.  Although  further  research  may 
discover  the  origin  of  some  of  these  "obscure" 
words,  as  they  are  called,  there  can  be  no 
doubt  that  most  of  them  are  new  creations, 
fresh-minted  in  the  popular  imagination. 

The  simplest  of  these  new  words  are  created 
by  the  process  called  by  the  awkward  name 
of  "onomatopceia,"  which  means  literally 
name-making,  but  is  used  to  describe  the 
process  by  which  a  word  is  made,  imitating  in 
its  sound  the  thing  which  it  is  intended  to 
describe.  This  imitation  of  natural  sounds 
by  human  speech  can  never  be  an  absolute 
imitation,  although  some  of  the  cries  of  birds 
and  animals  have  almost  the  character  of  ar- 
ticulate speech;  and  in  words  like  cuckoo  and 
miaow  we  do  approach  something  like  perfect 
representation.  This  means  of  word-making 
is  illustrated  by  the  old  story  of  the  foreigner 
in  China,  who,  sitting  down  to  a  covered  dish. 


102        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

inquired  "  quack-quack  "  ?  and  was  promptly 
answered  by  "bow-wow"  from  his  Chinese 
attendant.  But  direct  imitations  of  this  kind 
are  rare,  and  for  the  most  part  the  sounds  of 
nature  have  to  be  translated  into  articulate 
sounds  which  do  not  imitate  them,  but  which 
suggest  them  to  the  mind.  Thus  the  noise 
of  splashing  water  has  been  represented  by 
such  divers  sounds  as  hil-bit  and  glut-glut; 
the  nightingale's  song  by  buUbul,  jug-jug,  and 
whit-whit,  and  the  noise  of  a  gun  going  off, 
which  we  now  describe  by  bang,  was  originally 
rendered  by  the  word  bounce.  This  symbolism 
of  sounds,  the  suggestive  power  of  various 
combinations  of  vowels  and  consonants,  has 
never  been  very  carefully  studied,  but  certain 
associations  or  suggestions  may  be  briefly 
stated.  It  is  obvious,  for  instance,  that  long 
vowels  suggest  a  slower  movement  than  the 
shorter  vowels,  and  that  vowels  which  we 
pronounce  by  opening  the  mouth  convey  the 
idea  of  more  massive  objects;  while  those 
which  are  formed  by  nearly  closing  the  lips 
suggest  more  slight  movements  or  more 
slender  objects.  Thus  dong  is  deeper  in 
sound  than  ding,  clank  than  clink,  and  chip 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH      103 

is  a  slighter  action  than  that  described  by 
cJwp.  More  subtle  are  the  suggestions  pro- 
vided by  consonants;  thus  for  some  reason 
there  are  a  number  of  words  beginning  with 
qu  which  express  the  idea  of  shaking  or  trem- 
bling, as  quiver^  quaver^  and  quagmire.  The 
combination  hi  suggests  impetus,  and  generally 
the  use  of  the  breath,  as  blow,  blasU  blab, 
blubber;  fl  impetus  with  some  kind  of  clumsy 
movement,  as  flounder,  flop,  flump;  from  the 
combination  gr  we  get  words  Hke  grumble, 
which  express  something  of  the  same  meaning 
as  groan,  grunt,  grunch,  grudge,  and  the  mod- 
ern word  of  military  origin  to  grouse.  From 
scr  we  get  a  number  of  words  expressing  the 
sense  of  loud  outcry,  as  scream,  screech,  screek, 
scrike.  A  "stop"  consonant  like  k  ov  p  aX. 
the  end  of  words  suggests  a  sound  or  move- 
ment abruptly  stopped,  as  clip,  whip,  snip, 
clap,  rap,  slap,  snap,  flap;  while  sh  in  the 
same  place  describes  a  noise  or  action  that 
does  not  end  abruptly,  but  is  broken  down 
into  a  mingled  mass  of  smashing  or  rustling 
sounds,  as  in  dash,  splash,  smash,  etc.  The 
comparison  of  smack  and  smash,  clap  and 
clash  will  show  this  difference.   Words  ending 


104        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

in  mfi  Kke  hump,  dump,  slump,  thump,  con- 
vey the  sense  of  a  duller  and  heavier  sound, 
stopped  in  silence  but  more  slowly.  This 
suggestive  power  is  due  partly  to  direct  imi- 
tation of  natural  sounds,  but  more  to  the 
movements  of  the  vocal  organs,  and  their 
analogy  with  the  movements  we  wish  to 
describe;  an  explosive  sound  describes  an 
explosive  movement,  as  in  hlaM  or  blow,  while 
a  sound  suddenly  stopped  suggests  a  stopp)ed 
movement,  and  a  prolonged  sound  a  move- 
ment that  is  prolonged  also.  But  probably 
these  analogies  are  mainly  formed  by  associ- 
ation; a  conmaon  word  established  in  the 
language  describes  a  sound  or  action,  and  its 
sound  comes  to  be  connected  with  the  thing 
that  it  describes.  Other  words  are  formed  on 
its  model,  and  finally  the  expressive  iK)wer  of 
the  sound,  suggesting  as  it  does  so  many  other 
words  of  similar  meaning,  becomes  a  part  of 
the  unconscious  inheritance  of  those  who  use 
the  same  form  of  speech. 

Among  the  older  onomatopoeias  in  English 
may  be  mentioned,  in  addition  to  those  al- 
ready quoted,  hoot  and  chatter;  the  XVlllth 
Century  gave  us  fuss  and  flimsy;  and  pom- 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH      105 

pom,  a  word  which  arose  in  the  South  African 
War,  is  one  of  the  latest  additions  to  the  Hst. 
It  is  very  rare,  indeed,  that  a  word  is  dehber- 
ately  and  consciously  made  out  of  sounds 
arbitrarily  chosen,  but  this  has  sometimes 
been  successfully  accomplished,  as  in  Spenser's 
word  blatant  and  in  gas,  which  was  formed  by 
a  Dutch  chemist  in  the  XVIIth  Century. 
Laudanum  was  perhaps  an  arbitrary  term 
made  by  Paracelsus,  and  ogre  is  found  without 
known  antecedents,  in  the  writings  of  one 
of  the  earhest  of  French  fairy-tale  writers. 
Manufacturers  and  inventors  have  sometimes, 
as  we  all  know  too  well,  adopted  this  method 
of  naming  their  wares;  and  to  them  we  owe  at 
least  one  useful  word  formed  by  this  process — 
the  word  kodak,  which  has  been  borrowed  from 
English  into  several  foreign  languages. 

A  still  more  curious  class  of  new  words  are 
those  in  which  two  or  more  terms  are  com- 
bined, or,  as  it  were,  telescoped  into  one;  this 
is  an  old  process  in  language,  and  verbs  like 
to  don  (do  on)  or  to  doff  (do  off)  are  examples 
of  it  in  its  simplest  form.  Other  words  sup- 
posed to  have  been  formed  by  this  process 
are  flurry,  from  flaw  and  hurry;  lunch,  from 


106        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

lump  and  hunch;  while  flaunt  is  perhaps 
combined  out  of  fly,  fl/)ui,  and  vaunt.  Lewis 
Carroll  amused  himself  by  creating  words  of 
this  kind,  and  has  thus  added  at  least  two 
words  to  the  English  language — cJiortle,  prob- 
ably formed  by  suggestions  of  chuckle  and 
snorty  and  galumphy  out  of  gallop  and  triumph- 
ant. In  a  large  number  of  our  new  words, 
however,  it  is  difficult  to  define  the  definite 
associations  or  analyze  the  elements  that  give 
them  their  expressive  meaning.  They  seem  to 
be  creations  of  the  most  vital  faculty  in  lan- 
guage, the  sense  of  its  inherent  and  natural  fit- 
ness of  the  name  with  the  thing.  The  old  words 
bluff,  queer,  and  lounge  are  examples  of  this 
process,  which,  in  the  XVHIth  Century,  gave 
us  cantankerous  and  humbug,  and  several  other 
similar  words.  Sometimes  a  word  possesses  a 
vague,  undefined  expressiveness,  which  seems 
capable  of  embodying  various  meanings,  and 
words  of  this  kind  have  been  employed  for 
different  purposes  before  their  final  use  is 
settled.  Thus  conundrum,  which  probably 
originated  in  Oxford  or  Cambridge  as  a  piece 
of  jocular  dog-Latin,  was  first  the  appellation 
of  an  odd  person,  then  used  by  Ben  Jonson  for 


WORD-MAKING  IN  ENGLISH      107 

a  whim,  then  for  a  pun,  and  finally  settled 
down  to  its  present  meaning  at  the  end  of  the 
XVIIIth  Century.  The  old  word  roly-poly 
has  acquired  in  the  course  of  its  history  the 
following  meanings :  a  rascal,  a  game,  a  dance, 
a  pudding,  and  finally,  a  plump  infant.  The 
expressive  word  blizzard  seems  to  have  floated 
about  the  United  States  in  the  vague  sense  of 
a  "poser"  until  the  great  winter  storm  of 
1880  claimed  it  as  its  own. 

When  Dr.  Johnson,  in  his  Dictionary, 
came  to  recent  words  of  racy  character  and 
popular  origin,  like  coax  and  fun,  he  labelled 
them  "low  words,"  and  we  have  inherited 
from  him  a  somewhat  fastidious  and  scornful 
feeling  about  them.  And  yet  a  little  study  of 
the  history  of  literature  will  show  us  that  the 
most  admired  writers  of  the  past  took  a  very 
different  attitude  towards  popular  creations 
of  this  kind,  and  that  words  like  rowdy,  bogus, 
boom,  and  rollicking,  at  which  we  boggle, 
would  have  had  no  terrors  for  the  greatest  of 
our  old  poets.  Spenser  and  Shakespeare, 
for  instance,  adopted  at  once  the  then  recent 
and  probably  Irish  expression  hubbub.  The 
onomatopoeic  bump  and  the  dialect  dwindle 


108        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

make  their  first  appearance  in  Shakespeare's 
plays;  and  he  often  uses  the  word  hurry , 
which,  save  for  one  doubtful  instance,  was 
not  known  before  his  time.  Other  words  of 
a  similar  character — hang  and  bluster,  flare 
and  freak,  huddle  and  busUe — were  all  ap- 
parently of  XVIth  Century  origin,  and  all 
appear  in  the  writings  of  Spenser,  Shakespeare, 
or  Milton.  The  first  known  instance  of  gibber 
is  in  Horatio's  fines — 

"The  sheeted  dead 
Did  squeak  and  gibber  in  the  Roman  streets," 

and  Hamlet,  when  he  thought  of  kilfing  his 
uncle,  was  not  too  fastidious  to  say — 

"Now  I  might  do  it  pat,  now  he  is  praying." 

The  true  function  of  the  poet  is  not  to 
oppose  the  forces  that  make  for  life  and 
vividness  in  language,  but  to  sift  the  new 
expressions  as  they  arise,  and  ennoble,  in 
Shakespeare's  fashion,  those  that  are  worthy 
of  it,  by  his  usage. 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    109 


CHAPTER  V^ 

MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS 

Every  time  a  new  word  is  added  to  the 
language,  either  by  borrowing,  composition, 
or  derivation,  it  is  due,  of  course,  to  the  action, 
conscious  or  unconscious,  of  some  one  person. 
Words  do  not  grow  out  of  the  soil,  or  fall  on 
us  from  heaven;  they  are  made  by  individuals; 
and  it  would  be  extremely  interesting  if  we 
could  always  find  out  who  it  was  who  made 
them.  But,  of  course,  for  the  great  majority 
of  new  words,  even  those  created  in  the 
present  day,  such  knowledge  is  unattainable. 
They  are  first,  perhaps,  suggested  in  conversa- 
tion, when  the  speaker  probably  does  not 
know  that  he  is  making  a  new  word;  but  the 
fancy  of  the  hearers  is  struck,  they  spread  the 
new  expression  till  it  becomes  fashionable; 
and  if  it  corresponds  to  some  real  need,  and 

^  A  portion  of  this  chapter  was  published  in  the  English 
Review  of  August  1911,  and  is  here  reproduced  by  kind  per- 
mission of  the  editor. 


110        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

gives  a  name  to  some  idea  or  sentiment 
unnamed  or  badly  named  before,  it  has  some 
slight  chance  of  Kving.  We  witness,  almost 
every  day,  the  growth  of  new  words  in  popu- 
lar slang,  and  the  process  by  which  slang  is 
created  is  really  much  the  same  as  that  which 
creates  language,  and  many  of  our  respectable 
terms  have  a  slang  origin. 

"When,  however,  we  come  to  learned,  as 
opposed  to  popular  words,  the  case  is  some- 
what different.  These  for  the  most  part 
make  their  first  appearance  in  writing,  and 
some  of  them  are  deliberate  formations,  whose 
authors  have  left  on  record  the  date  and  occa- 
sion of  their  creation.  Our  words  quality 
and  moral  are  descended  from  Latin  words 
made  by  Cicero  to  translate  terms  used  by 
Aristotle;  deity  is  from  a  creation  of  St. 
Augustine's;  centrifugal  and  centripetal  are 
from  Latin  compounds  formed  and  first  used 
by  Sir  Isaac  Newton.  Many  of  our  more 
recent  words  are  also  dehberate  creations. 
Jeremy  Bentham  has  left  on  record  his  forma- 
tion of  the  word  international;  agnostic  and 
agnosticism  were  made  by  Huxley;  Coleridge 
confesses  to  have  made  the  verb  to  intensify. 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    111 

and  he  also  formed  anew  aloofness,  although 
it  had  been  used  at  least  once  before  his  time. 
Cyclone  was  the  deliberate  creation  in  1848 
of  a  meteorologist  who  wished  for  a  word  to 
describe  the  phenomenon  of  circular  or  whirl- 
ing winds,  and  anti-cyclone  was  suggested 
about  twenty  years  later  by  Sir  Francis 
Galton.  Constituency  was  an  invention  of 
Macaulay's,  for  which  he  apologized;  scientist 
was  deliberately  made  by  Whewell,  as  there 
was  no  common  word  till  then  to  describe 
students  of  different  kinds  of  science.  Other 
XlXth  Century  words  which  we  know  to 
have  been  deliberately  created  are  Eurasian, 
exogamy,  folklore,  hypnotism,  telegraph,  tele- 
phone, photograph,  besides  a  whole  host  of 
more  strictly  scientific  terms. 

But  most  words  never  possessed,  or  have 
soon  lost,  their  birth-certificates;  and  it 
would  seem  at  first  sight  impossible  to 
discover  how  they  arose.  Since,  however,, 
the  publication  was  begun  of  the  Oxford 
Dictionary,  whose  army  of  over  a  thousand 
readers  has  carefully  searched,  for  many 
years,  the  records  of  the  language,  and  has 
traced,  as  far  as  is  himianly  possible,  each  new 


112        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

word  to  its  first  appearance,  a  great  body  of 
new  information  has  been  made  available 
for  the  student.  Any  one  who  will  make  from 
this  work  a  collection  of  modem  words  and 
note  their  origin,  cannot  help  being  struck  by 
the  fact  that  many  of  our  most  expressive 
and  beautiful  words  are  first  found  in  the 
writings  of  certain  men  of  genius,  and  bear 
every  sign  of  being  their  own  creations.  Of 
course  we  can  never  know  for  a  certainty, 
unless  he  distinctly  states  it,  that  a  writer 
has  created  the  new  word  which  is  found 
for  the  first  time  in  his  writings.  He  may 
have  derived  it  from  some  undiscovered 
source,  or  he  may  have  heard  it  in  conversa- 
tion; all  we  can  know  is  that  the  word  was 
introduced,  and  became  current  at  about  the 
time  that  it  makes  its  first  app)earance  in  his 
work.  On  the  other  hand,  if  we  find  among 
a  number  of  contemporary  writers  in  whose 
works  few  or  no  new  words  are  found,  one  to 
whom  hundreds  of  new  formations  are  traced; 
if  these  are  learned  words,  not  likely  to  be 
used  in  conversation;  if  no  earlier  trace  of 
them  has  been  discovered,  and  if,  moreover, 
they  are  the  sort  of  words  we  should  expect 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    113 

this  writer  to  create — if  they  seem  to  bear, 
Hke  the  coinage  of  a  king,  the  stamp  of  his  per- 
sonahty  impressed  on  them, — then  surely  there 
is  at  least  a  strong  presumption  in  favour  of 
the  belief  that  he  created  or  first  borrowed 
them  himself.  Let  us,  for  example,  take  the 
instance  of  Sir  Thomas  Browne.  In  1646  he 
published  that  odd  and  interesting  book,  the 
Pseudodoxia  Epidemica,  and  although  his 
other  works  are  not  lacking  in  new  formations, 
this  book  contains  them  by  the  hundred,  and 
has  probably  given  currency  to  more  words 
in  the  English  language  than  any  one  book 
since  the  time  of  Chaucer.  And  these  words 
are  almost  all  just  the  words  that  we  would 
expect  him  to  create — long,  many-syllabled 
words  derived  from  the  Latin,  and  are  often 
expressive  of  his  own  musing  and  meditative 
mind — hallucination,  insecurity,  retrogression, 
precarious,  incontrovertible,  incantatory,  ante- 
diluvian— the  complete  list  would  fill  a  page 
or  more  of  this  book,  and  would  be  a  sufficient 
proof  that  a  writer  like  Browne  makes  for 
himself  a  large  part  of  his  own  vocabulary. 
And  it  is  a  proof,  moreover,  of  his  genius  for 
word-making  that  many  of  these  new  crea- 


114        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

tions — words  like  medical,  literary,  electricity 
— ^have  become  quite  indispenfiable  in  modern 
speech. 

Many  new  words  are  found  also  in  Milton*s 
writings  (the  greater  number  of  them  in 
Paradise  Lost),  words  like  dimensionless,  in- 
finitude, emblazonry,  liturgical,  ensanguined, 
anarch,  gloom,  irradiance.  Pandemonium,  ban- 
nered, echoing,  rumoured,  impassive,  moon- 
struck, Satanic.  These  words,  too,  bear  the 
stamp  of  his  coining,  and  proclaim  themselves 
the  offspring  of  his  genius. 

In  Shakespeare's  plays,  partly  owing  to 
their  immense  popularity,  but  quite  as  much 
to  his  unequalled  sense  for  language,  more 
new  words  are  found  than  in  almost  all  the 
rest  of  the  English  poets  put  together;  for 
not  only  is  our  speech  full  of  phrases  from  his 
plays,  but  a  very  large  number  of  our  most 
expressive  words  are  first  found  in  them.  And 
in  Shakespeare  we  find  that  rarest  and  most 
marvellous  kind  of  word-making,  when  in 
the  glow  and  fire  of  inspiration,  some  poet,  to 
express  his  thought,  will  venture  on  a  great 
audacity  of  language,  and  invent  some  un- 
dreamed-of word,  as  when  Macbeth  cries — 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    115 

"No,  this  my  hand  will  rather 
The  multitudinous  seas  incarnardine"; 

where  multitudinous  and  incarnardine  (as  a 
verb)  are  new  words;  or  where  Romeo  speaks 
of  the  "yoke  of  inauspicious  stars,"  or 
Prospero  of  *' cloud-cap't  towers"  and  "the 
hazeless  fabric  of  this  vision." 

Of  the  new  words  in  Chaucer  and  Wyclif 
we  have  already  spoken;  a  large  number  of 
new  terms  are  first  found  in  the  works  of 
their  contemporaries  Gower  and  Langland, 
and  in  those  of  Lydgate  and  Caxton  in 
the  XVth  Century;  and  Caxton  in  especial 
seems  to  have  introduced  a  large  number  of 
words  from  standard  or  Parisian  French. 
The  new  words,  indeed,  found  in  these  earher 
authors  are  almost  all  borrowings  from 
foreign  languages;  and  it  was  hardly  before 
the  XVIth  Century  that  EngHsh  writers 
began  to  form  compounds  freely.  But 
in  the  works  and  translations  of  Coverdale 
and  Tindale,  we  find  a  number  of  new  com- 
pounds :  loving-kindness i  blood-guiltiness,  noon- 
day, morning-star,  kind-hearted,  in  Coverdale; 
long-suffering,  broken-hearted  and  many  others 


lie        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

in  Tindale.  Scapegoat  was  a  mistranslation 
of  Tindale*s — one  of  those  happy  errors  which 
have  added  so  many  useful  and  expressive 
words  to  the  English  Language.  In  the  Re- 
vised Version  of  1611  we  do  not  find  many 
new  words;  but  the  efifect  of  this  version  in 
preserving  old-fashioned  terms  from  extinc- 
tion has  of  course  been  very  great. 

With  Spenser  we  reach  the  period  of  self- 
conscious  care  for  the  English  language. 
While  previous  writers  have  been  content 
to  write  in  the  English  of  their  time,  only 
occasionally  borrowing  or  forming  new  words 
when  they  needed  them,  Spenser  deliberately 
formed  for  himself  a  kind  of  artificial  lan- 
guage, made  up  partly  of  old  forms,  partly  of 
dialect  expressions,  and  partly  of  his  own  in- 
ventions. We  find  in  him  for  the  first  time  a 
process  to  which  the  English  language  owes 
much  of  the  present  richness;  the  deliberate 
revival  of  old-fashioned  and  obsolete  words; 
and  even  many  of  his  new  formations  like 
drowsihead,  idlesse,  dreariment,  elfin,  fool- 
happy,  have  often  an  archaic  character.  Like 
most  men  of  letters  who  revive  old  words,  he 
frequently  made  mistakes  about  their  form  or 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    117 

meaning;  derring-do  is  not  a  noun  but  a  ver- 
bal phrase  in  Chaucer  and  Lydgate,  whence 
he  took  it;  and  chevisance,  which  he  used  for 
"enterprise,"  was  really  a  word  meaning 
shiftiness;  and  he  employed  the  archaic  verb 
hight  in  a  number  of  senses  very  different 
from  its  true  meaning. 

With  the  Elizabethan  writers  and  drama- 
tists, like  Nashe,  Greene,  and  Chapman,  we 
come  on  yet  another  class  of  innovators,  whom 
we  may  call  eccentric  word-makers.  These 
writers  seem  to  love  innovation  for  its  own 
sake,  and  to  invent  new  words,  not  because 
they  are  well  formed  or  necessary,  but  simply 
for  the  sake  of  novelty  and  oddness.  Their 
works  provide  immense  lists  of  words  which 
are  only  used  by  their  own  creators,  and  have 
never  found  general  acceptance.  The  XVIIth 
Century  abounds  in  writers  of  this  kind,  whose 
poems  and  prose-writings  are  full  of  strange 
formations.  But  even  these  eccentrics  per- 
formed a  certain  service  to  the  language, 
for  by  continually  experimenting,  they  would 
sometimes  form  in  English  or  adopt  from 
Greek  or  Latin  a  word  that  deserved  to  live: 
thus  dramatist  and  fatalism  are  first  found  in 


118        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Cudworth,  and  in  the  enormous  list  of  strange 
formations  traced  to  Henry  More  are  a  num- 
ber of  current  words  like  central,  circuitousy 
decorous,  freakish,  and  fortuitous. 

Even  more  fortunate  were  two  secular 
writers  of  this  period,  Evelyn  and  Robert 
Boyle.  Evelyn  felt,  as  he  states  in  his  Diary, 
the  need  for  the  importation  of  foreign  words; 
and  of  the  large  number,  found  for  the  first 
time  in  his  writings,  many  were  no  doubt 
first  naturalized  by  him.  They  belong, 
for  the  most  part,  to  the  vocabulary  of 
art,  or  are  descriptive  of  the  ornaments  of 
life:  outline,  attitude,  contour,  pastel,  mono- 
chrome, balustrade,  cascade,  opera. 

The  new  words  found  in  Boyle's  writings 
are,  of  course,  of  a  different  character,  being 
for  the  most  part  scientific  terms,  such  as  pen- 
dulum, intensity,  pathological,  corpuscle,  essence 
in  the  sense  of  extract,  and  fluid  as  a  noun. 

Dryden's  works  contribute  many  new 
words;  a  large  number  of  French  phrases  were 
imported  by  the  Restoration  dramatists,  and 
with  the  reign  of  Queen  Anne  came  a  new 
enrichment  of  the  language.  Pope's  list  of 
new  words  is  the  longest  in  the  time  of  the 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    119 

early  Georges;  and  Dr.  Johnson,  in  spite  of 
his  declaration  that  he  had  rarely  used  a  word 
without  the  authority  of  a  previous  writer, 
would  seem,  if  we  are  to  judge  by  the  Oxford 
Dictionary,  to  have  added  a  considerable 
number  of  learned  words  to  the  language. 
Among  these  may  be  mentioned  irascibility, 
and  the  modern  meanings  of  words  like  acri- 
monious, literature,  and  comic.  When  we  find 
words  like  these,  with  the  exclamation  fiddle- 
dedee,  traced  by  the  Dictionary  to  Dr.  John- 
son; etiquette,  friseur,  picnic,  and  persiflage 
to  Lord  Chesterfield;  bored  and  blasS  to 
Byron,  propriety  in  its  modern  use  to  the 
eminently  proper  Miss  Burney,  and  idealism 
in  its  non-philosophical  sense  to  Shelley,  it 
begins  to  seem  as  if  authors  had  a  tendency 
to  invent  or  import,  or  at  least  to  use  first 
in  print,  words  descriptive  of  their  own 
characteristics. 

Of  other  XVIIIth  Century  writers.  Field- 
ing, Sterne,  and  Gibbon  were  not  word- 
creators;  but  Burke  seems  to  have  possessed 
this  faculty,  and  it  is  to  him,  apparently,  that 
we  owe  a  considerable  part  of  our  political 
vocabulary — words    Hke    colonial,    coloniza- 


120        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

iion,  diplomaq/,  federalism,  electioneering , 
expenditure,  financial,  municipality,  and  our 
modem  use  of  organizaiiony  representation, 
and  resources. 

The  rise,  at  the  end  of  the  XVIIIth  Cen- 
tury, of  the  Romantic  Movement  made  a 
demand  for  words  not  needed  in  the  previous 
century.  This  took  for  the  most  part  the 
form  of  the  revival  of  old  and  obsolete  words, 
like  chivalrous,  which  Dr.  Johnson  had  de- 
scribed in  his  Dictionary  as  out  of  use.  Sir 
Walter  Scott  was  the  greatest  of  these  word- 
revivers,  and  when  we  meet  with  fine  old 
swash-bucklers*  words  like  raid,  foray,  and  on- 
slaught, they  are  very  likely  to  come  out  of 
his  poems,  or  the  Waverley  Novels.  Fitful, 
which  had  once  been  used  by  Shakespeare, 
in  the  phrase  "after  life's  fitful  fever,"  he 
also  revived,  and  bluff  and  lodestar;  gruesome 
he  introduced  from  the  Scotch,  and  the 
romantic  word  glamour,  which  is  derived  from 
grammerye  (another  of  his  revivals),  and 
meant,  in  the  Middle  Ages,  grammar-learn- 
ing, the  study  of  Latin,  and  thus  in  ignorant 
minds  soon  acquired,  like  philosophy,  a  magi- 
cal meaning. 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    121 

Both  Coleridge  and  Southey  were  great 
experimenters  in  language,  and  both  almost 
equalled  the  XVIIth  Century  divines  in 
their  old,  learned,  and  outlandish  formations. 
But  among  Coleridge's  strange  words  we 
find  pessimism^  phenomenal,  and  Elizabethan, 
and  many  others  have  become  popular  and 
current. 

Wordsworth  and  Shelley  have  not  contrib- 
uted much  to  our  modern  vocabulary,  but 
Keats,  who  in  his  love  of  unusual  words 
showed  often  more  enthusiasm  than  taste,  was 
nevertheless  a  genuine  word-maker.  It  is 
true  that  of  the  many  old  words  he  revived, 
few  or  none  have  become  popular,  and  some 
of  his  own  inventions,  hke  aurorean  and 
beamUyy  are  not  happy  creations.  But  the 
poet  who  could  find  such  expressions  as 
winter's  "pale  misfeature"  ^'globed  pseonies,'* 
and  linen  "smooth  and  lavendered,""  must 
plainly  have  had  a  genius  for  word-creation, 
aud  would  have  done  much,  had  he  Hved,  to 
enrich  the  English  language.  And  Keats, 
like  Milton  and  Shakespeare,  possessed  that 
rare  gift  of  the  great  poet,  the  power  of  creat- 
ing those  beautiful  compound  epithets  which 


122        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

are  miniature  poems  in  themselves,  deep- 
damasked,  for  instance,  and  dew-dabbled,  and 
the  nightingale's  full-throated  ease. 

After  Keats  the  faculty  of  word-creation 
shows  a  remarkable  decline,  and  with  the 
exception  of  Carlyle,  the  harvest  of  new 
words  from  the  works  of  the  other  XlXth 
Century  authors  is  a  poor  and  scanty  one. 
Tennyson's  compound  epithets,  like  evU- 
starred,  green-glimmering,  and  Jlre-crowned, 
are  sometimes  beautiful,  and  we  owe  to  him 
apparently  Horatian,  moonlit,  and  fairy 
tales.  But  Tennyson  cannot  be  claimed  as  a 
great  word-creator;  and  still  less  can  be  said 
for  Browning,  whose  odd  formations  like 
crumblement,  febricity,  darlingness,  artistry, 
gamishry,  can  hardly  be  considered  valuable 
additions  to  the  language. 

In  Carlyle,  however,  the  Victorian  era 
possessed  one  great  word-creator,  one  who 
could  treat  language  with  the  audacity  of 
the  old  writers,  and  could,  like  them,  fuse  his 
temperament  into  a  noun  or  adjective,  and 
stamp  it  with  his  image.  Croakery,  gigmanity, 
Bedlamism,  grumbly,  dandiacal — would  any 
one  but  Carlyle  have  invented  words  like 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    123 

these?  He  had  a  genius  for  nicknames,  his 
pig-philosophy  and  dismal  science  are  still 
remembered,  and  his  eccentricities  and 
audacities  would  fill  many  pages.  But  his 
contributions  were  not  all  of  this  personal 
character;  like  Sir  Walter  Scott,  he  intro- 
duced words  like  feckless,  lilt,  and  outcome 
into  England  out  of  Scotland;  and  a  num- 
ber of  current  words  like  environment  and 
decadent  are  traced  to  his  writings. 

WThen  we  come  to  living  authors,  one 
searches  the  dictionary  in  vain  for  any 
serious  contributions  to  our  vocabulary  from 
their  works.  Although  at  least  twenty  new 
words  are  added  to  our  current  speech  every 
year,  and  although  in  countries  like  France 
or  Germany,  authors  and  men  of  letters  make 
at  least  an  attempt  to  provide  their  age  with 
expressive  terms  for  their  new  experiences, 
in  England  writers  seem  to  be  somewhat 
unduly  conservative,  and  to  leave  this  task 
to  others,  to  the  newspapers,  or  to  chance. 
At  the  present  day  our  only  deliberate  word- 
makers  are  the  men  of  science,  and  the 
popular  interest  in  their  discoveries  and 
inventions  tends  to  give  great  currency  to 


124        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

their  new  formations.  As,  moreover,  in  this 
age  of  newspapers  we  make  the  acquaintance 
of  our  new  words  by  reading,  and  not  as  of 
old,  through  speech,  these  new  formations 
do  not  undergo  the  processes  of  transforma- 
tion and  assimilation  by  which  words  were 
naturalized  in  the  past,  but  keep  their  clear- 
cut  and  alien  forms,  and  so  tend  to  produce 
a  learned  scientific  jargon,  which  is  not,  as 
of  old,  gradually  translated  into  English  by 
popular  speech,  but  tends,  on  the  contrary,  to 
extend  itself  over  our  old  English,  and  cripple 
or  destroy  the  methods  and  machinery  of  the 
ancient  language.  This,  from  the  point  of 
view  of  literary  or  idiomatic  English,  cannot 
but  be  regarded  as  a  misfortune,  although  an 
inevitable  one,  for  which  as  long  as  the 
present  state  of  things  continues,  no  remedy 
can  be  suggested.  For  there  can  be  no  doubt 
that  science  is  in  many  ways  the  natural 
enemy  of  language.  Language,  either  hterary 
or  colloquial,  demands  a  rich  store  of  living 
and  vivid  words — words  that  are  "thought- 
pictures,"  and  appeal  to  the  senses,  and  also 
embody  our  feelings  about  the  objects  they 
describe.     But  science  cares  nothing  about 


MAKERS  OF  ENGLISH  WORDS    125 

emotion  or  vivid  presentation;  her  ideal  is  a 
kind  of  algebraic  notation,  to  be  used  simply 
as  an  instrument  of  analysis;  and  for  this  she 
rightly  prefers  dry  and  abstract  terms,  taken 
from  some  dead  language,  and  deprived  of  all 
life  and  personality. 

However,  if  these  and  other  dangers  seem 
to  threaten  the  English  language,  we  must 
remember  that  it  has  passed  through  greater 
dangers,  and  suffered  from  far  worse  mis- 
fortunes in  the  past.  It  has  been  mutilated 
as  hardly  any  other  language  has  been  muti- 
lated, but  these  mutilations  have  made  place 
for  wonderful  new  growths;  its  vocabulary 
has  been  almost  destroyed,  but  new  and 
better  words  have  been  found  to  make  good 
these  losses;  foreign  influences,  French  and 
Latin,  have  threatened  its  existence,  but  it 
has  in  the  end  conquered  its  conquerors,  and 
enriched  itself  with  their  spoils;  and  we  may 
rest  confident  that  as  long  as  the  English 
nation  remains  vigorous  in  thought  and 
feeling,  it  will  somehow  forge  for  itself  a 
medium  of  expression  worthy  of  itself,  and 
of  the  great  past  from  which  it  has  inherited 
so  much. 


126        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 


CHAPTER  VI 

LANGUAGE   AND    HISTORY — THE    EARLIEST 
PERIOD 

We  have  hitherto  treated  the  subject  of  the 
Enghsh  language  more  in  its  formal  asj>ect, 
without  much  regard  to  the  thought  of  which 
it  is  the  expression,  and  which  fashions  it  for 
its  instrument.  The  last,  however,  is  the 
most  interesting,  and  certainly  the  most 
important,  aspect  of  the  subject;  but,  save 
for  the  earhest  period  of  our  race-history,  it 
has  not  yet  occupied  the  attention  of  many 
scholars.  The  study  of  "Semantics,"  as  it  is 
called,  the  science  of  meaning,  the  develop- 
ment of  life  and  thought  as  embodied  in 
language,  is  yet  in  its  infancy;  and  indeed, 
until  the  partial  completion  of  the  great 
Oxford  Didionaryy  in  which  every  word  is 
traced  as  carefully  as  possible  to  its  origin, 
and  all  its  changes  of  meaning  registered  in 
their  chronological  order,  no  such  study 
could  have  been  usefully  undertaken  in  regard 
at  least  to  the  later  periods  of  English  history. 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        127 

Every  sentence,  every  collection  of  words 
we  use  in  speech  or  writing,  contains,  if  we 
examine  its  component  parts,  a  strange 
medley  of  words,  old  or  modern,  native 
or  foreign,  and  drawn  from  many  sources. 
But  each  possesses  its  ascertainable  history, 
and  many  of  them  bear  important  traces  of 
the  event  or  movement  of  thought  to  which 
they  owe  their  birth.  If,  therefore,  we  analyze 
our  vocabulary  into  its  different  periods, 
separating  our  earliest  words  from  the  later 
additions,  we  shall  find  the  past  of  the  English 
race  and  civilization  embodied  in  its  vocabu- 
lary, in  much  the  same  way  as  the  history  of 
the  earth  is  found  embodied  in  the  successive 
strata  of  geological  formation.  For  it  is  not 
too  much  to  say  that  a  contradiction  between 
language  and  history  rarely  or  never  occurs. 
When  a  new  product,  a  new  conception,  a  new 
way  of  feeling,  comes  into  the  thought  of  a 
people,  it  inevitably  finds  a  name  in  their 
language — a  name  that  very  generally  bears 
on  it  the  mark  of  the  source  from  which  it  has 
been  derived. 

Let  us,  then,  take  our  modern  English 
civilization  in  a  few  at  least  of  its  broadest 


128        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

and  simplest  aspects,  and  attempt,  by  means 
of  language,  to  study  its  elements  and  proxi- 
mate sources,  and  the  periods  when  they 
were  accepted  into  the  consciousness  of  the 
race. 

By  far  the  oldest  deposit  in  the  EngHsh 
language  is  a  little  group  of  words  inherited 
from  the  ancient  Aryan  language,  which  was 
spoken  when  our  ancestors,  and  those  of  the 
Greeks,  the  Romans,  the  Slavs,  the  Persians, 
and  Hindoos  all  dwelt  together  in  some  un- 
known place,  at  some  remote  date,  far  in  the 
prehistoric  past.  Although  the  behef  in  a 
homogeneous  Aryan  race  is  now  generally 
abandoned,  the  evidence  of  language  shows  a 
continuity,  if  not  of  race,  at  least  of  culture; 
and  these  wrecks  and  fragments  of  speech, 
preserved  by  some  happy  accident,  are  by  far 
the  oldest  documents  we  possess  concerning 
our  civilization.  We  have  little  or  no  histori- 
cal knowledge  of  any  of  the  Aryan  peoples 
before  about  1000  B.C.;  beyond  that  period, 
to  the  time  of  the  primitive  Aryans,  there 
stretches  a  gap,  probably  of  many  thousands 
of  years,  which  we  can  only  cross  on  this  frail 
bridge  of  words.     The  earHest  pioneers  in 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        129 

the  study  of  language,  followed  this  track 
into  the  unknown  past  with  more  enthusiasm 
than  caution,  and  created  for  themselves  out 
of  a  few  old  and  battered  words  the  picture 
of  a  beautiful  golden  age,  a  kind  of  terrestrial 
paradise,  which  they  located  in  the  centre 
of  Asia,  where,  five  or  six  thousand  years  ago, 
they  believed  that  the  ancestors  of  the 
Aryan  races  dwelt  together  in  pastoral  and 
poetic  simplicity  and  plenty.  Recent  criti- 
cism, however,  has  destroyed  much  of  that 
beautiful  picture;  and  it  is  not  now  believed 
that  the  evidence  of  language  is  sufficient  to 
enable  us  to  reconstruct,  save  in  the  barest 
outline,  the  conditions  of  this  early  culture. 
Even  the  Asiatic  home  of  the  Aryans  is  no 
longer  generally  believed  in;  and  the  most 
widely  accepted  of  current  views  is  probably 
that  which  places  their  home  in  the  southern 
steppes  of  Russia,  whence,  at  their  separation, 
the  Indian  and  Persian  branch  wandered 
towards  the  East,  the  Slavs  and  Teutons  into 
the  German  forests,  and  the  Greeks  towards 
Greece;  while  the  ancestors  of  the  Celts  and 
Romans  followed  the  course  of  the  Danube 
towards  Italy  and  Gaul. 


ISO        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

It  would  be  beyond  our  scope,  however, 
to  treat  of  this  whole  subject  of  the  Indo- 
European  languages  and  the  primitive  Aryan 
civilization;  we  must  confine  ourselves  to  the 
words  existing  in  our  English  vocabulary 
which  have  been  derived  from  that  language, 
and  which  are  evidence  of  the  earHest  known 
stage  in  the  culture  of  our  race.  For  we  find 
in  this  primitive  deposit  of  language,  not  only 
the  original  forms  of  words  like  knee,  foot,  and 
tooth,  and  terms  for  our  simplest  acts  and  per- 
ceptions, but  others  more  indicative  of  a 
definite  state  of  civihzation.  The  numerals 
up  to  ten  descend  to  us  from  this  period;  the 
words  father,  mother,  daughter,  sister,  brother, 
son,  toidow  and  our  old  word  neve  (now  re- 
placed by  the  French  nephew)  show  that 
family  relationships  had  been  considerably 
developed.  Hound  is  an  Aryan  word,  and 
with  goat,  goose,  sow,  and  a  word  for  horse,  eoh, 
which  we  once  possessed,  but  which  has  long 
since  perished  in  our  language,  have  been 
taken  as  a  proof  that  these  animals  had  been 
more  or  less  domesticated.  But  the  most 
important  of  these  names  of  domesticated 
animals  are  connected  with  the  flocks  and 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        131 

herds  of  pastoral  life,  and  seem  to  show  that 
cows  and  sheep  were  the  main  property  and 
means  of  subsistence  for  this  ancient  people. 
Ewe,  wether,  and  wool,  cow,  ox,  steer,  herd, 
have  been  traced  back  to  the  early  Aryans, 
and  another  word  fee,  which  in  Old  English 
and  other  Teutonic  tongues  meant  both  cattle 
and  money,  and  which  is  related  to  the  Latin 
pecu,  from  which  pecuniary  descends.  La- 
deed,  the  accumulated  evidence  of  language 
proves  almost  beyond  a  doubt  that  the  Aryans 
were  a  nomadic  race,  similar  in  habits  to  the 
modern  Tartars,  driving  their  herds  of  cattle 
with  them  on  their  wanderings,  dependent 
for  the  most  part  on  their  meat  and  milk  for 
food,  and  on  their  skins  for  clothing.  The 
words  wheel,  nave,  axle,  yoke,  and  a  root  from 
which  our  wain  and  wagon  descend,  are  re- 
garded as  a  proof  that  wheels  had  been  in- 
vented, and  that  the  Aryans  travelled  in  carts 
drawn  by  cattle.  They  possessed  only  one 
word  for  any  kind  of  metal  (our  word  ore 
descends  from  it)  and  this  is  taken  to  stand 
for  copper,  which  is  often  found  in  a  form 
easily  hammered  into  use  by  primitive  peo- 
ples.   No  Aryan  words  for  sea  or  fish  have 


132        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

come  down  to  us;  but  our  verb  to  row,  and  our 
word  rudder  (which  originally  meant  a  paddle) 
seem  to  show  that  the  original  race  had 
learned  some  primitive  forms  of  river  naviga- 
tion, probably  in  a  canoe,  dug  out  from  the 
trunk  of  a  tree,  like  the  canoes  of  other  primi- 
tive people.  Door  is  a  very  ancient  word; 
timber  is  derived  from  an  Aryan  root;  and 
thatch  comes  from  an  old  verb  meaning  "to 
cover."  These  words  are  regarded  as  a  proof 
that  the  Aryans,  like  their  Germanic  descend- 
ants in  the  time  of  Tacitus,  had  begun  to 
build  some  kind  of  wooden  or  wicker  huts  for 
themselves,  without,  however,  windows,  for 
which  no  term,  common  to  the  related  lan- 
guages, is  found.  Our  word  mead  is  found  in 
many  Aryan  languages,  and  shows  that  this 
primitive  people  possessed  a  drink  made  from 
honey.  The  verb  to  weave  is  of  equal  an- 
tiquity and  seems  to  show  that  some  art  of 
making  cloth,  or  at  least  of  plaiting,  had  been 
early  acquired.  Words  showing  a  knowledge 
of  agriculture  are  few  and  of  doubtful  meaning, 
and  form  a  strong  contrast  to  the  terms  con- 
nected with  flocks  and  herds  and  wagons. 
The  word  tree,  the  names  of  birch  and  vnthy 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        133 

are  widely  distributed;  the  words  wolf,  the 
hare,  the  heaver,  the  otter,  the  mouse,  feathery 
nest,  are  of  great  antiquity,  and  night  and  star, 
dew  and  snow,  wind  and  thunder,  fire  and  east, 
are  primitive  terms,  or  ones  that  descend  from 
early  roots. 

The  greater  part  of  the  words  which  have 
come  to  us  from  this  early  period  are  of  a 
homely  and  some  even  of  a  coarse  character, 
and  we  are  not  accustomed  to  feel  any  spe- 
cially romantic  interest  in  them.  And  yet  they 
are  of  importance  as  forming  the  first  deposit 
of  human  experience  in  our  race  of  which 
we  have  any  knowledge;  the  nucleus  of  life 
around  which  our  present  civilization  has 
slowly  grown.  From  them  we  can  make  for 
ourselves  a  dim  picture  of  our  primitive 
ancestors,  dwelling  in  wattled  huts,  or  loading 
their  goods  and  chattels  on  their  wooden  ox- 
carts, and  driving  their  herds  of  cattle  and 
flocks  of  sheep  as  they  wandered  out  to 
seek  new  pasture-lands,  and  new  temporary 
habitations. 

And  when  we  consider  that  a  large  part 
of  these  words  are  still  spoken,  not  only  almost 
all  over  Europe,  but  in  some  of  the  remote 


184        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

languages  of  the  East,  we  can  find  in  them  a 
bond  which  makes,  if  not  the  whole,  at  least 
a  great  part  of  the  world  kin,  and  joins  our 
English  civilization  with  those  of  Persia  and 
India.  When,  too,  we  remember  the  unknown 
antiquity  of  these  words,  we  come  to  associate 
them  with  the  other  remains  of  an  unknown 
past  that  we  stiU  carry  with  us — old  rites 
which  are  still  practised,  superstitions  which 
still  haunt  our  minds,  and  the  antique  agri- 
cultural implements,  the  wheels  and  plough- 
shares and  shepherds'  crooks,  which  we  still 
see  in  use  about  us.  The  XlXth  Century, 
which  has  added  to  modern  life  many  material 
conveniences,  has  also  enriched  it  with  at 
least  one  new  way  of  feeling,  one  new  intellec- 
tual pleasure — the  projection  of  our  thoughts 
and  sympathies  through  thousands  of  years 
into  the  primitive  past,  beyond  all  dates  and 
records.  Our  modern  knowledge  of  the  an- 
tiquity of  our  Aryan  words  does  much  to  open 
for  us  these  vistas  and  vast  avenues  of  time; 
and  terms  like  mother ,  f other ,  brother y  sister, 
night  and  star  and  toind  are  all  the  more 
beautiful  and  dear  to  us,  because  we  know 
that  they  belong  to  the  innermost  core  of  our 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        135 

race-experience,  and  are  living  sounds,  con- 
veyed to  us  by  the  uninterrupted  speecli  of 
countless  generations  out  of  the  silence  and 
darkness  that  Ue  far  beyond  the  dawn  of 
history. 

The  next  step  in  the  history  of  our  primitive 
civihzation  is  one  that  we  also  leam  of  from 
the  history  of  language.  After  an  unknown 
period  the  Asiatic  group,  the  peoples  from 
whose  speech  those  of  the  Persians  and  In- 
dians are  derived,  spHt  off  from  the  original 
Aryans;  and  we  find  the  European  races 
still  dwelling  together,  and  acquiring  in  com- 
mon terms  that  betoken  a  certain  advance 
in  civilization.  There  is  reason  for  believing 
that  this  European  branch  had  made  their 
way  from  treeless  steppes  and  pasture-lands 
into  a  country  of  forests  ;  for  we  find  that  in 
this  West-Aryan  or  European  period,  when 
the  ancestors  of  the  Greeks,  the  Romans,  the 
Celts,  and  Teutons  were  still  closely  connected, 
a  number  of  words  for  trees  and  birds  make 
their  first  appearance.  Our  words  heech, 
hazel,  elm,  sallow,  throstle,  starling,  and  finch 
have  been  traced  with  more  or  less  certainty 
to  this  period,  and  we  also  find  a  number  of 


186        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

agricultural  terms  are  common  to  two  or 
more  of  the  West-Aryan  peoples — com  and 
JurroWy  bean  and  mealy  an  ear  of  com,  the  verb 
to  mowy  and  the  old  word  for  ploughing,  to 
ear,  which  is  now  obsolete  save  in  certain 
English  dialects,  although  it  is  used  in  the 
Revised  Version  of  the  Bible.  This  increase 
of  agricultural  terms  is  beheved  to  be  addi- 
tional evidence  of  the  migration,  at  this  time, 
from  a  treeless  to  a  wooded  country;  for 
nomadic  peoples  despise  agriculture,  and  only 
the  pressure  of  necessity  will  make  them 
abandon  for  it  their  pastoral  life.  It  was 
probably,  therefore,  when  our  ancestors  found 
themselves  in  the  dense  primeval  forests  of 
Europe,  with  their  scanty  pasture-lands  and 
stagnant  streams  and  wide  marshes,  that 
they  were  forced  to  supplement  the  easy  life 
of  shepherds  and  cattle-breeders  by  the  much 
more  laborious  occupations  of  agriculture.  If 
we  are  to  believe  the  evidence  of  language,  it  is 
at  this  period,  too,  that  our  ancestors  became 
acquainted  with  the  sea,  for  which  the  Asiatic 
and  European  languages  had  no  common 
word.  Our  word  mere,  which  is  still  used  in 
poetry  and  which  forms  the  first  part  of  the 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        137 

word  mermaid,  corresponds  to  the  Latin  marey 
from  which  we  derive  our  borrowed  word 
marine;  and  salt  and  iish  are  terms  common 
to  the  European  group. 

At  what  period  this  early  group  of  European 
tribes  separated  from  each  other  we  have  no 
knowledge;  but  it  was  long  before  the  earliest 
records  of  European  history  that  our  ancestors 
made  their  way  into  the  German  forests, 
while  the  ancestors  of  the  Greeks  and  Romans 
moved  towards  the  shores  of  the  Mediter- 
ranean. There  are  strong  hnguistic  grounds 
for  believing  that  the  ancestors  of  the  Celts 
and  Latins  travelled  for  a  while  together,  and 
those  of  the  Slavs  and  Teutons,  while  the 
Greeks  formed  a  group  of  their  own;  for  the 
Celtic  languages  are  believed  to  be  more 
nearly  related  to  Latin  than  Latin  is  to  Greek, 
and  the  Slav  and  Teutonic  speeches  have  cer- 
tain elements  in  common.  But  the  next  im- 
portant stage  in  the  history  of  our  race  is  that 
marked  by  the  group  of  languages  called 
Teutonic,  to  which  High  and  Low  German, 
English,  Dutch,  Norwegian,  Danish,  and 
Swedish  belong.  This  third  and  Teutonic  stra- 
tum of  our  civilization,  following  on  the  scanty 


1S8        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Aryan  and  West-Aryan  deposits,  is  a  very 
rich  one,  and  shows  very  marked  advances 
in  primitive  civiKzation.  To  treat  the  whole 
subject  of  Teutonic  life  would  be  beyond 
our  limits,  but  some  aspects  of  it  as  shown  by 
the  common  Teutonic  vocabulary  may  be 
briefly  noted.  There  is  a  large  addition  to  the 
vocabulary,  not  only  of  forest-terms,  names  of 
trees,  birds,  and  beasts,  but  also  to  that  of 
agriculture,  and  a  great  part  of  the  words  we 
use  in  farming  date  from  this  period.  Bowl 
and  brew,  brothy  Jcnead,  dough,  loaf,  are  words 
common  to  our  Teutonic  ancestors,  and  with 
hat,  comb,  and  felt,  house  and  home,  are  marks 
of  an  advancing  civihzation.  The  word  bor- 
ough was  still  used  for  a  fortified  place,  but  it 
had  perhaps,  even  in  this  early  period,  come 
to  acquire  a  meaning  something  like  that  of 
town  or  civic  community;  while  king  and  earl 
show  the  advance  of  civil  organization,  al- 
though these  words  had  not  of  course,  like 
many  of  the  others,  the  developed  meanings 
we  attach  to  them  now.  The  words  buy,  ware, 
worth,  and  cheap  (which  originally  meant  bar- 
ter) are  evidence  of  the  growth  of  trade,  while 
in  the  early  vocabulary  of  the  Teutonic  tribes 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        139 

the  sounds  and  sights  of  the  sea  are  very  ap- 
parent, and  show  how  our  ancestors,  in  their 
home  by  the  Baltic  and  the  North  Sea  coasts, 
acquired  the  arts  of  seamanship,  and  that 
famiharity  with  natural  phenomena  which  is 
so  important  to  sailors.  The  words  sea,  sound, 
and  island,  flood,  cliff,  and  strand  belong  to 
this  period,  and  with  them  ship,  steer,  sail,  and 
stay.  The  names  of  the  points  of  the  compass. 
North,  South,  East,  and  West,  are  a  common 
inheritance  of  the  German  languages,  and  they 
possess  in  common,  too,  words  like  storm, 
shower,  and  hail,  the  name  whale  for  any  large 
sea-beast,  seal,  and  mew  for  the  sea-gull,  and 
even  a  name  for  an  imaginary  water-demon, 
which  survives  in  the  German  Nixe,  and  in 
our  old  and  haK-forgotten  word  Nicker. 

The  discovery  of  the  metals  is  rightly  re- 
garded as  a  great  turning-point  in  the  his- 
tory of  culture;  nothing  has  a  greater  influence 
on  the  development  of  civiHzation  than  the 
use  of  metals  and  metallic  instruments;  and 
archaeologists  divide  the  different  stages  of 
prehistoric  culture  according  to  the  presence 
or  absence  of  copper,  bronze,  and  iron.  The 
primitive  Aryans  possessed,  as  we  have  seen. 


14a       THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

but  one  term  for  metals,  which  they  used  to 
designate  copper,  the  only  metal  that  they 
knew.  But  the  Teutonic  tribes,  before  our 
Anglo-Saxon  ancestors  separated  from  them, 
had  acquired  words  for  gold  and  silver,  lead, 
tin,  iron,  and  steel,  and  the  sinister  and  magi- 
cal character  of  blacksmiths  in  old  German 
legends  is  a  proof  of  the  wonder  with  which 
the  new  art  of  forging  was  regarded.  Other 
words  that  show  a  great  advance  inciviHzation 
are  leech,  a  healer,  and  lore,  and  also  book 
and  torite — words  which  have  acquired  new 
meanings  in  the  course  of  time,  but  which 
date  from  this  Teutonic  period,  when,  as  we 
know  from  other  sources,  the  rudiments  of 
the  art  of  writing  had  been  acquired.  Book 
(which  is  thought  to  be  derived  from  beech) 
originally  signified  a  writing-tablet,  probably 
of  wood,  and  torite  (which  is  related  to  the 
German  word  reissen,  to  tear)  meant  to  cut 
letters  in  bark  or  wood. 

If  we  examine  the  commonly  accepted 
etymologies  of  others  of  these  Teutonic  words, 
we  can  get  some  little  ghmpses  into  the  ways 
of  our  far-off  Teutonid  ancestors.  We  note, 
first  of  all,  a  group  of  words  that  seem  to  have 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        141 

grown  out  of  the  experience  of  those  wander- 
ings which  were  so  important  a  part  of  primi- 
tive hfe.  Fear^  for  instance,  is  beheved  to  be 
derived  from  the  same  Aryan  root  as  /are, 
and  could  therefore  suggest  the  dangers  of 
travel  in  the  early  forests;  learn  has  been 
traced  to  an  early  root  meaning  to  "follow  a 
track,"  and  weary  to  a  verb  meaning  "to 
tramp  over  wet  grounds  and  moors."  There 
are  other  words  that  take  us  back  to  bygone 
ways  of  life — our  verb  to  earn,  for  instance,  is 
derived  from  an  old  word  meaning  "field- 
labour,"  and  is  cognate  with  the  German 
Ernte,  harvest;  gain,  although  it  has  come 
to  us  from  French,  is  descended  from  a 
Teutonic  verb  meaning  "to  graze,  to  pasture," 
and  also  "to  forage,  to  hunt  or  fish."  Free 
comes  from  an  Aryan  root  meaning  "dear" 
(whence  also  our  word  friend),  and  meant,  in 
old  Teutonic  times,  those  who  are  "dear"  to 
the  head  of  the  household — that  is,  connected 
with  him  by  ties  of  kinship,  and  not  slaves  or 
in  bondage.  Our  important  religious  word, 
bless,  carries  us  far  back  into  the  pagan  and 
prehistoric  past;  bless  is  derived  from  blood, 
and  its  original  meaning,  which  was  "to  mark 


142        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

or  consecrate  with  blood,"  is  evidence  of  the 
ritual  use  of  blood,  which  is  so  common  among 
primitive  peoples.  Our  word  mirth  has  been 
given  a  curiously  psychological  derivation, 
for  it  is  traced,  with  its  related  adjective 
Tnerryy  to  a  word  meaning  "short,"  and  is 
supposed  to  designate  "that  which  shortens 
time,  or  cheers. 

We  must,  however,  in  all  these  old  words, 
especially  those  describing  thoughts  and 
feelings,  beware  of  the  anachronism  of  reading 
into  them  their  modern  meanings.  Thus  fear 
had  the  objective  sense  of  a  sudden  or  terrible 
event  till  after  the  Norman  Conquest;  the 
early  meaning  of  mirth  was  "enjoyment, 
happiness,"  and  could  be  used  in  Old  English 
of  religious  joy;  while  merry  meant  no  more 
than  "agreeable,  pleasing."  Heaven  and 
Jerusalem  were  described  by  old  poets  as 
"merry"  places;  and  the  word  had  originally 
no  more  than  this  signification  in  the  phrase 
"merry  England,"  into  which  we  read  a  more 
modern  interpretation. 

The  progress  of  civilization  has  been  well 
compared  to  the  course  of  a  river  having 
many  sources,  some  undiscovered;    and  for 


I 


LANGUAGE  AND    HISTORY    143 

historians  of  culture  those  points  at  which  a 
broad  tributary  joins  the  main  stream  have, 
of  course,  an  especial  interest.  We  have  now 
traced  our  ancestors  from  their  original  and 
unknown  home,  to  the  coasts  and  forests  of 
Germany,  where,  at  the  period  at  which  we 
now  arrive,  they  were  still  savages,  in  spite 
of  their  notable  advances  in  the  arts  of  life, 
and  still  dwelt  in  rude  huts  or  underground 
excavations,  or  migrated,  as  of  old,  on  their 
ox-carts.  They  had  doubtless  borrowed  from 
neighbouring  tribes  many  of  their  new  arts, 
and  learnt  from  them  the  use  of  new  products. 
There  are  scholars  who  hold  that  the  knowl- 
edge of  iron  came,  with  its  name,  from  some 
Celtic  race;  and  that  the  word  silver  was 
derived  from  Salube,  a  town  on  the  Black  Sea, 
mentioned  in  the  Iliad  as  the  original  home  of 
silver.  The  words  rat  and  ape  are  also  be- 
lieved to  be  very  early  borrowings,  but  their 
sources  have  not  been  discovered;  and  it  is 
difficult  or  impossible  to  trace,  in  the  dark 
night  of  prehistoric  time,  the  influences,  the 
contacts  with  neighbouring  peoples,  from 
which  these  new  products  and  the  names  of 
these  new  animals  were  derived. 


144        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

But  we  are  now  approaching  one  of  the 
great  meeting-places  of  history,  when  our 
ancestors  were  about  to  come  in  contact  with 
races,  and  fall  under  the  spell  of  influences, 
which  were  to  transform  their  life  in  a  marvel- 
lous manner,  and  to  create,  out  of  ignorance 
and  savagery,  our  modern  world  of  culture. 
When  the  primitive  European  group  of  the 
Aryans  was  broken  up,  and  our  Teutonic 
ancestors  lost  themselves  for  hundreds  or 
thousands  of  years  in  the  deep  forests  of 
Germany,  their  related  tribes,  from  whom  the 
Greeks  and  Romans  were  descended,  made 
their  way  more  or  less  directly  to  the  Mediter- 
ranean; and  on  these  propitious  shores,  the 
birthplace  of  modern  thought  and  life,  they 
came  in  contact  with  the  ancient  civilization 
of  Egypt  and  the  East.  They  learnt  the  arts 
of  building  in  stone,  of  mining  and  navigation; 
they  took  from  the  East  the  beginnings  of 
art,  of  writing,  of  mathematics,  and  built  up 
the  wonderful  edifice  of  classical  civilization 
which,  first  led  by  Greece,  and  then  by  Rome, 
settled  the  main  elements  and  outlines  of 
human  culture.  The  light  shines  very  clearly 
on  this  page  of  ancient  history,  when  the 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        145 

highest  forms  of  thought  and  life  were 
developed  in  the  great  centres  of  Athens 
and  Rome,  and  spread  their  luminous  in- 
fluence over  wider  and  wider  areas;  the 
darkness  in  which,  on  the  other  side  of  the 
Alps,  our  ancestors  were  involved,  seems 
pitchy  black  by  comparison,  and  it  would  be 
beyond  our  task  to  describe  how,  little  by 
Kttle,  that  darkness  was  partially  dispelled. 
All  we  can  do  is  to  trace,  by  certain  words 
early  borrowed  by  the  Northern  barbarians 
from  the  polished  nations  of  the  South,  some 
gleams  of  light  that  penetrated  northward  in 
this  early  period,  before  the  tribes  of  the 
^  Angles  and  Saxons  invaded  England.  These 
gleams  are  faint  and  uncertain,  and  there  is 
considerable  doubt  about  many  of  our  earli- 
est borrowings.  Taking  them,  however,  for 
what  they  are,  we  may  gain  a  Httle  hypothet- 
ical knowledge,  at  least,  concerning  this  early 
period.  To  try,  moreover,  to  arrange  the 
words  chronologically  is  also  highly  preca- 
rious, as  there  is  always  the  possibility  that  a 
word  which  appears  in  several  cognate  lan- 
guages did  not  belong  to  the  original  stock  be- 
fore their  separation,  but  has  spread  from  one 
to  the  other  of  the  tribes  since  that  date. 


146        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Following,  however,  the  opinion  of  the  best 
authorities,  we  may  take  the  word  Ccesary  the 
title  of  the  Roman  Emperor,  as  probably  the 
earliest  Latin  word  adopted  into  the  Teutonic 
speech.  This  word,  however,  in  the  form 
in  which  they  borrowed  it,  has  become  obso- 
lete in  EngHsh,  and  has  come  to  us  again 
from  Latin.  Other  early  terms  which  show 
some  contact  with  the  forces  of  Rome  are  of 
a  mihtary  character — pUe  and  camp  and  drake 
(an  old  word  for  dragon),  which  was  borrowed 
probably  to  describe  the  dragon-banners  of 
the  Roman  cohorts.  Drake  still  lives  in  the 
compound  fire-drake;  pUe  has  since  lost  its 
original  meaning  of  "a  heavy  javelin,"  such 
as  the  Roman  soldiers  carried;  and  camp  no 
longer  signifies  for  us  battle,  or  field  of  battle, 
and,  indeed,  only  survives  in  the  name  of 
"camp-ball,"  or,  in  the  dialect  phrase  of 
provincial  athletics,  "to  camp  the  bar" — 
our  modem  "camp"  being  a  much  later 
borrowing  from  the  French.  Street  (from 
strata  via,  a  paved  way)  and  mile  and  waU 
and  toll,  are  also  beheved  to  be  early  borrow- 
ings, showing  that  our  ancestors  were  familiar 
with  the  roads,  fortified  camps  and  regula- 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        147 

tions  of  the  Roman  Empire.  Perhaps  even 
earher  than  these  are  cat,  mule,  and  ass;  and 
a  group  of  words  which  remain  as  a  testimony 
of  the  visits  of  wandering  traders  from  the 
South — chest  and  ark  (which  meant  originally 
a  box  or  chest);  pound,  as  a  measure  of 
weight;  inch;  and  seam,  an  old  word  for  the 
load  of  a  pack-horse,  which  still  survives  in 
various  technical  uses.  Monger,  in  ironmon- 
ger OT  fishmonger,  comes  to  us  from  a  borrow- 
ing of  mango,  a  Latin  name  for  a  trader; 
copper  was  perhaps  taken  from  his  copper 
coins,  and  the  word  mint  (which  kept  the 
meaning  of  money  till  the  XVIth  Century) 
was  also  borrowed,  being  derived,  like  the 
later  money,  from  the  name  of  the  goddess 
Moneta,  in  whose  temple  at  Rome  money  was 
coined.  Among  the  names  for  the  foreign 
products  brought  by  these  early  traders  we 
find  idne,  and  an  old  word  ele,  for  oil.  Pepper 
is  an  early  borrowing;  it  has  been  traced  back 
to  India,  and  is  among  the  first  of  those  an- 
cient, far-travelled  words  that  have  come  into 
the  English  from  remote  sources  in  the 
Orient — words  like  the  later  ginger,  silk,  and 
orange,  redolent  of  deserts  and  caravans,  far 


148        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

mountains,  and  Eastern  seas.  These  early 
words  give  us  a  dim  picture  of  Roman  traders, 
travelling  with  their  mules  and  asses  along 
the  paved  roads  of  the  German  provinces, 
their  chests  and  boxes  and  wine-sacks,  and 
their  profitable  bargains  with  our  primitive 
ancestors. 

Civilization  begins,  however,  not  so  much 
by  the  importation  of  foreign  products  (which 
can  be  found  in  the  most  savage  communi- 
ties) as  by  the  imitation  of  foreign  arts  and 
technical  processes.  We  possess  in  English 
a  small  group  of  words  which  show  that  our 
ancestors  had  begun  to  take  this  step  before 
they  left  the  Continent.  Chalky  in  the  sense 
of  Ume,  has  been  taken  as  a  proof  that  they 
learnt  the  art  of  building  with  mortar  from 
the  Romans;  and  they  also  borrowed  the 
word  pit,  which  seems  to  have  meant,  in  early 
times,  a  well  or  spring  built  round  with  ma- 
sonry. Table  and  pillow  speak  for  themselves; 
mill  is  an  important  borrowing,  and  the  word 
hitchen,  kettle,  dish,  point  to  a  revolution  in 
cooking  arrangements.  Cheese,  and  perhaps 
butter,  may  be  regarded  as  words  whose  adop- 
tion signifies,  not  the  appearance  of  new  ob- 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        149 

jects,  but  of  new  and  improved  methods  of 
producing  them.  Other  words  that  show  an 
advance  in  civilization  are  connected  with 
agriculture,  and  especially  with  the  cultiva- 
tion of  fruit-trees.  Apple  is  probably  a  very 
early  borrowing,  but  its  origin  is  unknown, 
although  some  have  traced  it  to  the  town  of 
Abella  in  Campania,  famous  in  antiquity  for 
its  apples.  Better  established  borrowings  are 
pear,  cherry,  and  plum,  the  two  latter  being 
ultimately  derived  from  Greek.  Our  words 
imp  and  plant  are  believed  to  be  early  adop- 
tions, and  to  show  that  the  art  of  grafting 
fruit-trees  was  acquired  at  this  time,  for  the 
original  meaning  of  both  these  words  was 
that  of  a  shoot  or  slip  used  in  grafting.  The 
German  language  has  preserved  some  Latin 
words,  proving  that  the  culture  of  the  vine 
was  established  at  an  early  date  in  the  German 
provinces,  and  poppy  and  mint  are  prehistoric 
borrowings  of  the  names  of  plants.  Anchor 
seems  to  be  the  only  sea-term  they  took  from 
the  Latin,  for,  as  we  have  seen,  they  had  a 
developed  sea-vocabulary  of  their  own. 

Although  before  the  Ilird  Century  of  the 
Christian  era  the  Rhine  lands  had  become  a 


150        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

centre  of  Roman  civilization,  with  Roman 
roads,  fortresses,  stone-built  houses  and  mar- 
ble temples,  the  above  hst  of  words  will 
show  that  the  German  tribes  borrowed  from 
these  rich  storehouses  of  culture  only  such 
things  as  their  barbarian  minds  could  appre- 
ciate— not  ideas,  but  homely  instruments,  use- 
ful plants,  and  methods  of  production.  [\But 
there  are  a  few  very  interesting  words  which 
made  their  way  into  the  language  at  this  eariy 
date,  and  which  show  the  beginning  of  the 
influence  of  ideas,  and  the  dawning  of  that 
great  worid  of  thought  and  f  eehng,  the  Chris- 
tian religion,  which  was  destined  to  absorb 
and  transform  the  primitive  culture  of  these 
Teutonic  tribesX.The  most  important  of  these 
terms  is  the  word  churchy  which  is  in  itself  an 
historical  document  of  great  interest.  While 
most  of  the  other  languages  of  Europe  re- 
ceived from  Latin  Christianity  the  word 
ecclesia  for  church  (as  we  see  in  the  French 
Sglise,  the  Italian  chiesa),  church  (the  Anglo- 
Saxon  ciricCy  circe)  is  believed  to  be  derived 
ultimately  from  the  Greek  kuriakon,  mean- 
ing "the  Lord's  House,**  a  name  not  uncom- 
mon for  sacred  buildings  in  the  provinces  of 


LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY        151 

Eastern  Christianity.  This  Greek  word  was 
probably  learnt  by  the  German  mercenaries 
in  the  Eastern  provinces,  serving,  as  so  many 
served,  in  the  Roman  armies,  or  by  the  Goths 
who  invaded  lands  where  Greek  was  spoken. 
From  the  IVth  Century  onward  Christian 
churches,  with  their  sacred  vessels  and  orna- 
ments, were  well-known  objects  of  pillage  to 
the  German  invaders  of  the  Empire,  and  the 
pagan  Angles  and  Saxons  borrowed  this  Greek 
name  for  the  churches  they  sacked,  centuries 
before  they  entered  them  as  believers.  j| 

Angel,  and  less  certainly  Devil,  are  words 
of  Christianity  which  were  perhaps  directly 
borrowed  from  the  Greek:  the  names  of 
supernatural  spirits  pass  easily  from  tribe 
to  tribe,  and  these  words  perhaps  reached  our 
ancestors  in  this  way.  It  is  not  for  more 
than  a  thousand  years  that  we  find  again  any 
direct  borrowing  from  Greek  into  English, 
and  then  the  words  are  taken  from  books  by 
enlightened  scholars  of  the  Renaissance,  not 
whispered  from  ear  to  ear  by  superstitious 
barbarians. 

The  Christian  Church  was  divided  at  this 
time  by  the  great  Aryan  heresy,  and  these 


152        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Greek  words  came  to  our  ancestors  from  the 
heterodox  East.  But  they  were  also  affected 
by  a  second  stream  of  influence  from  the 
orthodox  Church  of  the  West,  which  reached 
them  through  the  Christians  of  Gaul  and 
Germany;  and  from  these,  before  they  came 
to  England,  our  ancestors  are  beHeved  to  have 
borrowed  the  words  almSi  bishop^  monk,  and 
minster  (the  name  for  a  monastery  or  a  mon- 
astic church),  and  also  the  word  pine,  from 
which  our  verb  to  pine  descends,  and  which, 
being  derived  from  the  Latin  poena,  was  used 
in  the  early  Church  to  describe  the  pains  of 
hell.  It  was  with  these  dim  and  vague  notions 
in  their  heads  that  they  embarked  in  their 
warlike  boats  to  cross  the  sea  to  England. 


CHAPTER  Vn 

LANGUAGE    AND   HISTORY — THE     DARK     AND 
THE  MIDDLE  AGES 

Vf Behave,  in  the  previous  chapter,  traced 
the  evidence,  embedded  in  the  English  lan- 
guage, of  the  culture  of  our  ancestors,  and 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        153 

their  progress  in  civilization  up  to  the  time 
when  they  left  the  Continent  to  settle  in  their 
English  homes.  From  the  Roman  civiHzation 
of  Britain,  which  they  destroyed,  and  from 
its  Celtic  inhabitants,  whom  they  massacred 
or  enslaved,  they  received,  if  we  are  to  be- 
lieve what  language  tells  us,  practically  noth- 
ing. The  Latin  word  castra,  which  survives 
in  the  name  of  Chester,  and  the  ending  of 
many  other  names,  such  as  Doncaster, 
Winchester,  etc.,  is  almost  the  only  word  they 
can  be  proved  to  have  taken  from  the 
Romanized  Britons;  while  from  the  Celtic 
speech,  as  we  have  already  seen,  their  borrow- 
ings were  equally  scanty. 

The  next  great  stratum  in  our  language, 
the  next  great  deposit  of  civilization,  is  that 
left  by  the  conversion  of  the  Angles  and 
Saxons  to  Christianity  in  the  Vlth  and  Vllth 
Centuries.  By  their  conversion  they  were 
transformed  into  members  of  the  community 
of  Europe;  and  at  this  point  the  two  streams 
of  Teutonic  race  and  classical  civilization  at 
last  met  and  mingled.  In  the  Vlth  Century, 
however,  Europe  was  plunged  in  the  night 
of  the  Dark  Ages;   it  was  not  the  culture  of 


154         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Athens  and  free  Rome,  the  literature  and 
philosophic  thought  of  the  great  classical 
tradition,  that  the  Christian  missionaries 
brought  to  England,  but  the  rites  and  the 
doctrines  of  the  Church  as  they  were  preached 
and  understood  in  the  obscure  period  of  the 
late  Roman  Empire.  The  effect  on  English 
life  and  thought  was  nevertheless  immense, 
and  we  must  test  it,  not  only  by  the  foreign 
words  which  were  brought  by  Christianity 
into  our  language,  but  also  by  the  change  of 
meaning  in  our  native  words  due  to  Christian 
influence.  The  early  missionaries,  in  order  to 
make  their  simpler  and  more  fundamental 
doctrines  clear  to  the  understandings  of  their 
hearers,  chose  native  words  nearest  the 
meanings  they  wished  to  express;  and  thus 
much  of  our  religious  vocabulary  is  formed 
out  of  old  words  filled  with  new  significance, 
words  such  as  Gody  heaven,  heUy  love,  and  sin. 
The  Anglo-Saxons,  indeed,  like  the  modem 
Germans,  preferred  to  translate,  rather  than 
to  borrow  foreign  terms,  and  some  Christian 
words  were  rendered  by  native  equivalents 
which  have  since  become  obsolete,  as  r6d  or 
rood,  the  native  word  for  the  Latin  cross. 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        155 

Many  Christian  words  were,  nevertheless, 
borrowed  from  Greek  and  Latin,  and  still 
remain  in  the  language  as  witnesses  of  that 
great  transformation.  Among  them  may  be 
mentioned  altary  alh,  candle,  cowl,  creed, 
disciple,  font,  nun,  mass,  shrine,  and  temple, 
from  Latin.  Acolyte,  archbishop,  anthem, 
apostle,  canon,  clerk,  deacon,  epistle,  hymn, 
martyr,  pentecost,  pope,  psalm,  psalter,  and 
stole  are  words  borrowed  at  the  same  time, 
which  are  of  Greek  origin,  but  which  were 
adopted  in  Latin,  and  came  from  Latin  into 
English. 

If  we  examine  the  vocabulary  of  Continen- 
tal Christianity,  so  large  a  part  of  which  has 
been  imported  at  various  times  into  English, 
we  shall  see  that  most  of  the  terms  belong  to 
the  classical  languages  of  Greece  and  Rome, 
but  that  they  have  been  curiously  trans- 
formed, and  have  acquired  new  and  strange 
significations,  by  being  made  the  medium  of 
Christian  thought  and  feeling.  The  Greek 
language  did  not  possess  terms  to  describe  the 
deeper  experiences  of  religious  Hfe;  still  less 
were  such  words  to  be  found  in  the  speech  of 
the  practical  and  warlike  Romans.    The  task. 


156         THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

therefore,  set  before  the  early  Christians  was 
to  forge  from  these  materials  a  new  language 
capable  of  expressing  a  whole  new  world  of 
thought — the  beautiful  or  dark  conceptions 
of  Oriental  mysticism  and  introspection,  the 
dizzy  heights  of  Oriental  poetry,  and  the  joys 
and  terrors  of  the  soul.  This  task  they  ac- 
complished with  amazing  success.  Partly  by 
changing  the  meaning  of  old  words,  partly 
by  the  formation  of  new  derivatives,  partly 
by  violent  translations  of  Hebrew  idioms,  and 
to  a  certain  extent  by  borrowing  Hebrew 
words,  they  found  means  to  express  such 
conceptions  as  charity,  salvatioHy  purgatoryy 
sacramenty  and  miracley  and  many  others. 
Sabbath  was  borrowed  from  the  Hebrew, 
abbot  from  the  Syriac;  the  Greek  word  for 
"overseer,"  episcopoSy  became  our  bishop; 
the  daimoHy  the  god  or  divine  power  of 
the  Greeks,  was  changed  into  the  medieval 
demon;  eidolouy  a  word  for  "image"  or 
"phantom,"  became  our  idol;  and  the  aggeloSy 
or  messenger,  the  diabolos,  or  slanderer,  were 
transformed  into  the  great  figures  of  Angel 
and  Devil. 
There  remain  two  other  Christian  words 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        157 

which  deserve  more  than  a  passing  mention. 
One  of  these  is  Easter,  in  which  is  preserved 
the  name  of  a  pagan  goddess  of  the  dawn  or 
spring,  and  of  a  pagan  spring  festival,  which 
Christianity  adopted  to  its  purposes.  The 
other  word  is  cross,  which  embodies  in  its 
form  an  important  aspect  of  EngHsh  history. 
The  word  crux,  which  denoted  an  instrument 
of  execution  in  classical  Latin,  and  which 
was  given  by  Christianity  so  tender  and 
miraculous  a  meaning,  was  translated  into 
Anglo-Saxon,  as  we  have  said,  by  the  native 
word  rod.  Cross  is  a  form  borrowed  by  the 
Irish  from  the  Latin  crux,  and  spread  by  them, 
in  their  great  missionary  efforts  among  the 
Danish  populations  whom  they  converted 
in  the  north  of  England.  It  appears  first  of 
all  in  northern  place-names  like  Crosby, 
Crosthwaite,  etc.,  and  finally  makes  its  way 
from  the  northern  dialects  into  literary 
English.  The  word  cross,  therefore,  which  we 
employ  in  so  many  and  often  such  trivial 
uses,  is  a  memorial  for  us  of  the  golden  age 
of  Irish  civilization,  when  Ireland  was  the 
great  seminary  of  Europe,  whence  mission- 
aries travelled  to  convert  and   civilize,  not 


158        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

only  the  pagan  north  of  England,  but  a  large 
part  of  the  Continent  as  well. 

The  conversion  of  England  meant,  however, 
not  only  the  introduction  of  a  new  rehgion. 
The  flood  of  Christianity  flowed  from  sources 
deep  in  the  past  of  Greece  and  Asia,  and 
brought  with  it  much  of  the  secular  thought 
and  knowledge  which  it  had  gathered  on  its 
way;  and  the  union  of  England,  moreover,  to 
the  universal  Church  opened  for  our  ancestors 
the  door  into  the  common  civihzation  of 
Europe.  Of  the  effect  of  these  influences  on 
Anglo-Saxon  culture,  the  growth  of  Uterature 
and  learning,  before  the  Conquest,  it  is  hardly 
within  our  province  to  speak;  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  language,  with  its  multitude  of  terms 
formed  from  native  elements,  was  partially 
destroyed,  as  we  have  seen,  at  the  Norman 
Conquest,  and  almost  all  its  learned  words 
perished — we  are  only  concerned  with  the 
deposit  left  in  om*  living  English  speech  by 
this  first  great  flood  of  European  culture. 
With  the  Bible  came  words  redolent  of  the 
East,  like  camel,  lion,  palm,  cedar,  and  terms  of 
drugs  and  spices,  like  cassia  and  hyssop,  and 
myrrh,  which  was  one  of  the  offerings  of  the 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        159 

Magi  to  the  infant  Christ.  Gem,  too,  is  a 
Bible  word,  and  crystal,  which  our  ancestors 
used  not  only  for  the  mineral,  but  for  ice  as 
well,  as  they  believed  rock-crystal  to  be  a 
form  of  petrified  ice.  The  more  secular  part 
of  the  early  deposit  of  borrowed  words  from 
other  sources  resolves  itself  very  largely,  like 
the  earher  Continental  borrowings,  into  the 
names  of  useful  instruments,  animals,  plants, 
and  products.  Cup,  kiln,  mortar,  mat,  post, 
pitch,  Jan  (for  winnowing), 2?/a5<er  (in  its  medi- 
cal use),  are  among  the  early  EngHsh  borrow- 
ings, and  with  them  the  names  of  capon, 
lobster,  trout,  mussel,  and  turtle  (for  turtle-dove) , 
and  of  useful  plants  like  cole  (cabbage),  pars- 
ley, pease,  asparagus,  beet,  fennel,  radish,  with 
trees  like  pine  and  box. 

The  lily  and  the  rose  are  also  Anglo-Saxon 
borrowings,  but  seem  to  have  been  used  first 
in  Hterary  allusions.  The  names  India  and 
Saracen  reached  England  before  the  Norman 
Conquest;  and  there  are  two  far- wandered 
words  like  the  earher  pepper,  and  the  later 
orange,  which  travelled  to  Anglo-Saxon  Eng- 
land from  remote  sources  in  the  East.  One 
of  them,  our  famihar  word  ginger,  is  derived 


160        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

from  the  Sanskrit,  and  believed  to  belong 
ultimately  to  one  of  the  non-Aryan  languages 
of  Lidia.  Ginger  was  imported  into  Greece 
and  Italy  from  India,  by  the  way  of  the  Red 
Sea;  ancient  merchants  brought  its  name 
with  them,  whence  it  came  to  us  through 
Greek  and  Latin.  SUk  is  beheved  to  have 
come  all  the  way  from  China,  and  to  have 
reached  us  from  Greece  and  Rome  through 
some  Slavonic  language,  and  by  means  of 
early  traders  in  the  Baltic  provinces.  Phomix, 
the  name  of  an  imaginary  bird,  and  adamant, 
used  in  literature  to  describe  a  half-fabulous 
rock  or  crystal,  combining  the  qualities  of 
the  diamond  and  the  loadstone,  were,  with  the 
earHer  drake,  the  first  of  the  names  of  the 
legendary  animals  and  jewels  to  reach  us 
from  the  East.  Purple,  being  the  name  of 
the  royal  cloth  worn  by  kings,  was,  like  the 
earher  Ccesar,  a  reminiscence  of  the  Roman 
Empire;  school,  scholar,  verse,  philosophe,  are 
faint  gleams,,  penetrating  in  the  dark  ages  of 
this  remote  island,  from  the  light  of  Athenian 
civilization.  The  words  circle  and  horoscope 
borrowed  late  in  the  Old  English  period,  are 
traces  of  the  interest  which  the  Anglo-Saxons 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        161 

took  in  mathematics  and  astrology.  But 
among  the  words  of  learned  borrowing  that 
seem  to  have  survived  the  Norman  Conquest, 
not  a  few  were  really  forgotten  with  their 
companions,  and  were  adopted  again  from  the 
French.  Thus  the  antique  and  noble  word 
philosopher,  which  King  Alfred  had  taken 
from  the  Latin  in  the  form  of  philosophe, 
appeared  again  in  the  XlVth  Century  in  the 
French  form  of  filosofe;  circle  and  horoscope 
also  perished,  and  were  re-borrowed  in  the 
same  century;  and  our  word  scholar  probably 
comes  to  us  not  from  Early  EngHsh,  but  from 
the  later  French. 

While  the  terms,  therefore,  for  the  common 
and  unchanging  experience  of  life,  for  the  most 
vivid  of  human  conceptions,  sun  and  summer, 
moon,  stars  and  night,  heat  and  cold,  sea  and 
land,  hand  and  heart,  and  for  the  commonest 
human  ties  and  strongest  human  feelings, 
remain  in  English  substantially  unchanged 
from  the  terms  that  the  Angles  and  Saxons 
inherited  from  a  prehistoric  past,  practically 
all  our  terms  of  learning  and  higher  civiliza- 
tion have  been  borrowed  from  the  Continent, 
and  especially  from  France.    The  conquered 


162        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

island  of  England  was  for  centuries  a  pale 
moon,  illuminated  by  the  sun  of  French 
civilization;  and  it  must  now  be  our  task  to 
trace  the  penetration  of  that  light  into  the 
English  language  and  the  common  conscious- 
ness of  the  English  people.  For  the  influence 
of  France  before  the  Conquest  language  gives 
little  evidence.  We  find  two  or  three  French 
names  for  drugs  or  herbs  in  learned  works, 
and  at  the  time  that  ginger  was  borrowed 
from  the  Latin,  galingale  came  through 
France  after  even  a  longer  journey,  having 
travelled  through  Arabia  and  Persia  all  the 
way  (it  is  beheved)  from  China,  where  it  was, 
in  its  original  form,  Ko-liang-kiangy  "mild 
ginger  from  Ko,"  a  place  in  the  province  of 
Canton. 

Two  other  French  words  borrowed  before 
the  Conquest  are  of  considerable  interest. 
These  are  pride,  which  appears  about  a.d. 
1000,  and  proud,  which  came  in  about  fifty 
years  later.  They  are  both  derived  from  the 
French  pnid  {preux  in  modem  French),  which 
descends  from  the  first  element  in  the  Latin 
verb  prodesse,  "to  be  of  value."  These  words, 
which  in  French  had  the  meaning  of  "valiant. 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        163 

brave,  gallant/*  soon  acquired  in  English  the 
sense  of  "arrogant,  haughty,  overweening." 
This  change  of  meaning  was  due,  perhaps,  to 
the  bearing  of  the  "proud"  Normans  who 
came  over  to  England  before  the  Conquest  in 
the  train  of  Edward  the  Confessor,  and  the 
aspect  in  which  these  haughty  nobles  and 
ecclesiastics  presented  themselves  to  the  Eng- 
lishmen they  scorned.  Another  word  intro- 
duced at  this  time,  and  no  doubt  by  Edward 
the  Confessor,  is  Chancellor — a  word  full  of 
old  history,  which,  for  all  its  present  dignity, 
is  derived  ultimately  from  cancer,  the  Latin 
word  for  crab.  How  the  cancellarius,  a 
petty  oflScer  of  the  Eastern  Empire,  stationed 
at  the  bars  or  crab-like  lattices  (cancelli) 
of  the  law  courts,  rose  from  an  usher  to  be 
notary  or  secretary,  and  came  to  be  invested 
with  judicial  functions,  and  to  play  a  more 
and  more  important  part  in  the  Western 
Empire,  belongs,  however,  to  European,  and 
not  to  English  history;  but  the  word  is  of 
interest  to  us  as  being  one  of  the  three  or 
four  French  terms  that  found  their  way  into 
English  in  Anglo-Saxon  times. 

Before  we  dismiss  the  subject  of  Anglo- 


164        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Saxon  borrowings,  there  are  a  few  words  of 
Danish  derivation  that  should  be  mentioned. 
The  greater  part  of  the  Scandinavian  words 
in  English  have  not  much  historical  signifi- 
cance, save  in  so  far  as  they  are  a  record  of 
the  Danish  invasions,  and  the  large  Danish 
element  in  the  Enghsh  population.  The  great 
word  laWy  however,  and  such  terms  as  mooty 
hustings,  and  the  names  for  the  divisions  of 
counties,  wapentake  and  riding,  all  of  which 
appear  in  English  in  the  late  Anglo-Saxon 
period,  are  memorials  of  the  fact  that  England 
was  once  partly  settled  and  ruled  by  Danes. 

We  now  come  to  the  Norman  Conquest, 
which  was  destined  to  change  and  trans- 
fonn  our  language  in  so  radical  a  manner. 
Of  its  eflFect  on  English  grammar  we  have 
already  spoken;  its  influence  on  the  Enghsh 
vocabulary  was  still  greater,  but  did  not 
make  itself  felt  for  a  considerable  period 
of  time.  For  nearly  one  hundred  and  fifty 
years  the  two  languages,  Anglo-Saxon  and 
Norman-French,  ran  side  by  side  without 
minghng;  French  being  the  language  of  the 
government  and  the  aristocracy,  while  Eng- 
lish was  reduced  almost  to  the  condition  of  a 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        165 

peasant's  dialect.  Some  relics,  however,  of 
written  English  during  the  first  hundred  years 
after  the  Conquest  have  been  preserved,  and 
after  the  year  1150  these  grew  somewhat 
more  numerous;  although,  as  we  have  seen, 
it  was  not  till  the  XlVth  Century  that  a 
standard  English  was  established,  and  authors 
ceased  to  employ  in  writing  their  own  local 
dialects. 

The  largest  class  of  words  adopted  into 
English  between  the  Conquest  and  the  year 
1200  are  of  an  ecclesiastical  character,  and 
show  the  influence  of  the  Norman  devotion 
to  the  Church.  These  words  in  approxi- 
mately chronological  order  are  prior,  chaplairiy 
procession,  nativity,  cell,  miracle,  charity,  arch- 
angel, evangelist,  grace,  mercy,  passion,  para- 
dise, sacrament,  saint — words  that  we  may 
associate  with  the  solemn  abbeys  and  cathe- 
dral churches  of  Norman  architecture,  which 
were  then  being  built  in  so  many  parts  of 
England.  The  remaining  words  are  almost 
all  connected  with  government  and  war  and 
agriculture.  Court  and  crown,  empress,  legate, 
council,  prison,  robber  and  justice,  rent  in  the 
sense  of  property,  are  the  terms  of  govern- 


166        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

ment;  while  for  military  words  we  find  tower 
and  castle,  standard,  peace,  and  treason.  War, 
another  early  borrowing,  is  a  word  adopted 
into  French  from  old  German;  it  came  to  us 
in  its  Norman  form,  but  has  become  (with  the 
common  change  of  w  to  gu)  guerre  in  modem 
French. 

In  the  Xnith  Century  the  process  of  bor- 
rowing went  on  with  great  rapidity,  and  hun- 
dreds of  French  words  were  adopted  into 
English,  which  now  began  to  assume  the 
composite  character  which  it  has  ever  since  re- 
tained. An  analysis  of  these  words  will  give 
some  notion  of  the  character  of  this  period, 
beginning  with  the  turbulent  reign  of  King 
John,  and  continued  during  those  of  his  son 
Henry  m,  and  his  grandson  Edward  I.  In 
the  first  place  we  find  a  great  accession,  es- 
pecially in  the  first  half  of  the  century,  to  the 
vocabulary  of  rehgion.  The  eariier  of  these 
represent  Cathohcism  more  in  its  formal  and 
outward  aspect;  but  shortly  after  the  coming 
of  the  preaching  friars  to  England,  when  the 
effects  of  the  great  religious  revival  of  the 
Continent  were  brought  home  to  the  villagers 
and  poor  townsfolk,  we  find  other  words 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        167 

representing  the  inward  and  personal  aspect  of 
religious  faith,  devotion,  jrity,  patience,  com- 
fort, anguish,  conscience,  purity,  salvation. 
These  words  we  may  call,  not  perhaps  too 
fantastically,  "early  Gothic"  words,  as  their 
introduction  coincides  in  date  with  the  great 
churches,  such  as  Sahsbury  Cathedral,  and 
the  great  monastic  houses,  which  were  then 
being  erected  in  what  is  called  the  "Early 
English"  period  of  Gothic  architecture. 

Another  rehgious  movement  of  about  this 
period,  that  of  the  Crusades,  has  left  its  mark 
on  the  English  language.  By  the  Crusades 
the  gulf  between  Europe  and  the  Orient  was 
again  bridged,  and  Eastern  products  and 
Eastern  ideas  began  to  spread  over  Europe. 
The  East  was  from  of  old  the  home  of  jewels, 
rich  dyes,  and  splendid  stuffs,  and  among  the 
Arabian  or  Persian  words  that  came  to  us 
from  this  new  intercourse  with  the  Orient,  are 
terms  like  azure  and  safron,  of  scarlet,  which 
was  at  first  the  name  of  a  rich  cloth,  and 
damask,  from  the  name  of  the  town  Damas- 
cus. To  this  period  we  owe  also  the  Arabian 
names,  and  our  modern  knowledge,  of  two  of 
the  great  staples  of  modern  trade,  cotton  and 


168        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

sugar;  and  the  word  orangey  which  (like  sugar) 
came  from  Sanskrit  through  the  medium  of 
Persian  and  Arabic,  found  its  way  to  the  West 
in  the  train  of  the  Crusaders.  Others  of  the 
Crusaders*  words  are  assassin.  Bedouin,  haz- 
ard, lute,  caravan,  and  mattress,  from  Arabian 
sources;  miscreant,  and  perhaps  capstan  of 
French  or  Provengal  formation.  Assassin  is, 
like  Bedouin,  a  plural  noun,  meaning  "hash- 
ish-eaters." It  was  used  by  the  Crusaders 
for  the  murderers  who  were  sent  forth  by  the 
Old  Man  of  the  Mountains  to  kill  the  Christian 
leaders,  and  who  were  wont  to  intoxicate 
themselves  with  hashish  or  hemp  before  under- 
taking these  attempts.  Hazard  (originally  a 
game  played  with  dice)  has  been  traced  to  the 
name  of  a  castle,  Hasart,  or  Asart,  in  Pales- 
tine, during  the  siege  of  which  the  game  is  said 
to  have  been  invented.  Miscreant  (misbe- 
liever) is  a  term  of  abuse  for  the  Mohamme- 
dans, invented  by  the  French  Crusaders; 
Capstan  is  a  nautical  term  from  Provence,  and 
as  it  appears  earlier  in  English  than  in  French, 
it  was  perhaps  borrowed  at  this  time  by  Eng- 
lish seamen  at  Marseilles  or  Barcelona. 
These  Crusaders*  words,  however,  drifted 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        169 

into  English  at  various  times,  for  the  most 
part  long  after  the  Xlllth  Century;  of  words 
actually  adopted  at  this  time,  the  most  im- 
portant, after  the  religious  terms  already 
mentioned,  are  terms  of  law,  government,  and 
war.  It  was  in  the  Xlllth  Century  that 
English  law  and  English  legal  institutions  be- 
gan to  take  the  form  that  they  were  destined 
to  keep  for  the  future,  and  we  find  now  in 
English  (for  the  most  part  borrowed  from  the 
Anglo-French  language  of  law),  such  words 
as  judge  and  judgment,  inquest,  assize,  accuse 
and  acquit,  fine,  imprison,  felon,  hue  and  cry, 
plea,  pleader  and  to  plead,  with  a  number  of 
other  terms  relating  to  property  or  feudal 
usages,  such  as  manor,  heir,  feoff,  homage.  It 
is  in  this  century,  too,  that  the  Enghsh  Parlia- 
ment assumed  substantially  its  present  form, 
and  the  great  word  Parliament  makes  its  first 
appearance.  The  campaigns  of  Edward  I 
against  the  Welsh  and  the  Scotch  seem  to 
have  familiarized  his  subjects  with  many 
military  terms  in  the  latter  part  of  the  Xlllth 
Century,  and  it  is  now  that  battle,  armour, 
assault,  conquer,  and  pursue  are  first  found  in 
the  vocabulary  of  English. 


170        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

If  in  the  Xlllth  Century  the  degraded  and 
poverty-stricken  English  language  had  begun 
to  enlarge  and  enrich  its  vocabulary  with 
terms  of  religion,  law,  government,  and  war,  in 
the  following  century  it  became  a  fit  vehicle 
at  last  for  thought,  learning,  and  speculation, 
and  absorbed  into  its  texture  practically  all 
the  vocabulary  of  medieval  culture.  We  find 
first  of  all  those  names  of  exotic  animals  that 
figured  so  fantastically  in  the  medieval  imag- 
ination. The  ostrichy  the  leopard,  the  panther, 
already  made  their  appearance  in  the  XHIth 
Century;  these  in  the  next  hundred  years 
were  followed  by  the  crocodile^  the  hippo- 
potamtiSf  the  elephant^  the  dromedaryy  the 
rhinoceros,  the  camelopard,  the  hyena,  the  tiger, 
and  the  pard.  But  with  the  names  of  these 
real  beasts  came  a  host  of  fabulous  and  fan- 
tastic creatures,  equally  real,  however,  to  the 
medieval  mind,  the  monoceros  or  unicorn, 
the  syren,  who  was  half  woman  and  half  fish, 
the  onocentaur,  with  the  head  of  a  man  and  the 
body  of  an  ass,  the  griffin,  with  an  eagle's 
wings  and  a  lion's  body,  the  salamander,  which 
lived  in  flame,  the  fire-breathing  chimera,  the 
basilisk  or  cockatrice,  which  was  hatched  by 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        171 

a  serpent  from  a  cock's  egg,  and  whose  glance 
was  fatal,  the  dipsas,  whose  bite  produced  a 
raging  thirst,  and  the  amphisbcena,  sl  serpent 
with  a  head  at  either  end.  And  even  of  the 
authentic  and  actually  existing  animals  their 
behefs  were  almost  equally  fabulous;  to  them 
the  camelion  was  a  combination  of  the  camel 
and  the  lion,  the  camelopard  had  the  body  of 
a  pard  and  a  lion's  head;  the  elephant  was 
supposed  to  hide  its  offspring  in  deep  water 
to  protect  it  from  dragons;  and  our  phrase, 
"crocodiles'  tears"  is  due  to  the  belief  that 
crocodiles  wept  while  they  sated  themselves 
on  human  flesh. 

With  the  knowledge  of  these  exotic  beasts 
and  serpents,  came  also  the  names  of  many 
jewels  and  precious  stones,  with  their  sup- 
posed magical  qualities.  The  carbuncle^  which 
shone  in  the  dark,  the  amethyst,  which  pre- 
served its  possessor  from  intoxication,  the 
jacinth  which  warded  off  sadness,  and  which, 
with  the  chrysophrase,  was  found  in  the  heads 
of  Ethiopian  dragons,  the  sapphire,  which 
gave  its  possessor  the  power  of  prophecy, 
appear  in  the  English  of  the  Xlllth  Century; 
while  in  the  XTVth  are  found  the  beryl,  which 


172        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

preserves  domestic  peace,  the  diamond,  which 
discovers  poison,  jasper,  useful  against  fevers, 
and  coral  against  enchantments,  chalcedony 
against  ghosts  and  drowning,  and  the  names 
of  other  precious  materials  such  as  amher, 
ebony,  alabaster,  jet,  and  pearl.  When,  how- 
ever, we  examine  the  vocabulary  of  medicine, 
we  find  ourselves  in  a  less  fabulous  world. 
The  medical  lore  of  the  Middle  Ages  was 
somewhat  more  directly  founded  on  experi- 
ence, and  already  in  the  XlHth  Century  we 
find  such  words  as  medicine,  ointment,  poison, 
powder,  diet,  physic,  physician,  dropsy,  gout, 
malady,  with  approximately  their  modern  and 
scientific  meanings.  This  medical  vocabulary 
is  increased  in  the  XlVth  Century  by  apothe- 
cary, artery,  pore,  vein;  the  names  of  drugs 
like  opium,  and  of  diseases  such  as  asthma, 
quinsy,  palsy,  and  dysentery. 

But  if  we  examine  the  theory  of  medicine  on 
which  the  practice  of  these  medieval  physi- 
cians is  based,  we  find  ourselves  far  removed 
indeed  from  modern  science.  This  theory  is 
in  the  main  the  Greek  theory  of  "humours" 
which  reached  Europe  in  the  Xlth  and  Xllth 
Centuries  from  the  great  schools  of  Arabian 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        173 

medicine.  According  to  this  theory  the  body 
of  man  contains  four  "humours,"  or  Kquids: 
blood,  phlegm,  yellow  bile  (or  choler)  and 
black  bile  (or  melancholy),  the  last  of  which 
is  a  purely  imaginary  substance.  The  excess 
of  one  of  these  humours  might  cause  disease, 
or  make  a  man  odd  or  fantastic;  and  hence 
we  have  the  humours  of  the  Elizabethan 
drama,  our  phrases  good-humoured  or  bad- 
humouredy  and  our  modern  use  of  humorous 
and  humour.  That  the  Latin  word  for  a  liquid 
or  fluid  has  come  to  mean  a  mood,  or  a  quality 
exciting  amusement,  and  that  we  can  even 
speak  of  "dry  humour,"  is  due,  therefore,  to 
this  old  physiology,  which  has  left  many  other 
marks  on  the  English  language.  An  examina- 
tion of  some  of  our  commonest  expressions 
will  show  how  many  of  them  bear  the  impress 
of  medieval  thought,  and  how  great  is  the 
deposit  left  in  the  English  language  by  the 
science  and  culture  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Thus 
our  names  for  different  temperaments,  san- 
guine, 'phlegmatic,  choleric,  and  melancholy,  are 
derived  from  the  supposed  predominance 
in  each  one  of  the  four  humours.  The 
word  temperament  itseK,  which  has  become 


174        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

so  popular  of  late,  is  derived  from  the 
Latin  temperamentum,  meaning  "due  mix- 
ture," and  was  used  at  first  for  the  mixture 
of  these  humours;  and  the  familiar  word 
complexion  (derived  from  the  Latin  complex- 
ionem,  formed  from  the  verb  pledere,  to  weave 
or  twine)  had  originally  the  same  meaning  as 
temperamenty  although  now  it  is  mainly  used 
for  the  appearance  of  the  skin.  As  the  tem- 
perament or  complexion,  sanguine,  bilious, 
phlegmatic,  or  melancholy,  could  be  best 
observed  in  the  face,  this  step  from  a  man's 
physical  condition  to  its  appearance  in  his 
face,  was  a  natural  one,  although  it  requires 
some  knowledge  of  medieval  notions  to  trace 
the  relation  of  the  modern  adjective  complex 
and  such  a  phrase  as  "a  fair  complexion." 

Closely  connected  with  the  four  humours 
were  the  four  elementary  "quahties":  dry- 
ness and  moisture,  heat  and  cold.  There  were 
also  quahties  of  the  "humours,"  and  by  their 
mixture  produced  various  complexions  and 
temperaments:  temper  itself  was  originally  a 
due  mixture  or  proportion  of  these  quahties, 
and  this  use  has  survived  in  such  words  as  dis- 
temper,  and  "good"  or  "bad"  tempered.    As 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        175 

temper  was  most  frequently  used  in  combina- 
tion with  words  like  "ill/*  "bad,"  or  "vio- 
lent," it  has  acquired  in  the  XlXth  Century 
(in  such  a  phrase,  for  instance,  as  "an  out- 
burst of  temper"),  the  very  opposite  of  its 
original  meaning.  For  an  outburst  of  temper 
would  have  meant  "an  outburst  of  compo- 
sure"; and  while  we  keep  the  old  meaning  in 
the  phrase  "to  keep  one's  temper,"  our  other 
phrase,  "to  have  a  temper"  exactly  contra- 
dicts it.  Spirited,  animal  spirits,  and  good 
spirits  are  other  phrases  due  to  the  physi- 
ologists of  the  Middle  Ages,  who  regarded 
the  arteries  as  air-ducts,  containing  ethereal 
fluids  distinct  from  the  blood  of  the  veins.  Of 
these  "spirits,"  there  were  supposed  to  be 
three,  the  animaly  the  vital,  and  the  natural. 
The  "animal,"  being  named  after  the  soul 
or  anima,  was  the  highest,  and  controlled 
the  brain  and  nerves.  When  animal  in  the 
XVIIth  Century  became  restricted  in  mean- 
ing to  living  creatures  lower  than  man,  ani- 
mal spirits  changed  with  it,  and  came  to  mean 
the  joy  of  life  we  share  with  animals.  Phrases 
such  as  cold-blooded,  in  cold  or  hot  blood,  or  my 
blood  boils,  are  due  also  to  the  old  view,  de- 


176        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

rived  from  the  sensations  of  the  face,  that  the 
blood  is  heated  by  excitement;  while  an  im- 
mense nmnber  of  words  and  phrases,  hearty^ 
heartless,  to  take  to  heart,  to  learn  by  heart,  and 
cordial  (from  the  Latin  word  for  heart)  are  due 
to  the  old  belief  that  the  heart  was  the  seat  of 
the  intellect,  the  soul,  and  feelings.  So,  too, 
hypochondriacal,  and  its  modern  abbrevia- 
tion hipped,  come  to  us  from  the  medieval 
belief  that  the  region  of  the  hypochondria, 
containing  the  Uver,  spleen,  etc.,  was  the  seat 
of  the  "melancholy"  humour.  Another 
medical  error  is  embodied  in  the  old  word 
rheumatic,  as  rheumatism  was  believed  to  be 
a  defluxion  of  rheum  to  the  affected  part;  and 
there  is  a  reminiscence  of  medieval  psychology 
to  be  found  in  common  sense — the  common 
sense  being  a  supposed  "internal"  sense, 
acting  as  a  common  bond  or  centre  for  the 
five  "external"  senses. 

The  Xlllth  Century  word  lunatic  is  evi- 
dence of  the  early  belief  that  mental  health 
was  affected  by  the  changes  of  the  moon; 
while  the  adjectives  jovial,  saturnine,  mercu- 
rial, are  due  of  course  to  the  astrological  belief 
that  men  owed  their  temperaments  to  the 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        177 

planets  under  which  they  were  born.  Indeed, 
the  large  deposit  left  by  medieval  astrology 
in  the  English  language  is  a  suflScient  proof  of 
the  great  part  that  celestial  phenomena,  and 
the  supposed  influence  of  the  stars  on  the 
affairs  of  men,  played  in  the  imaginative  life 
of  the  Middle  Ages.  Influence  itself  (derived 
from  the  Latin  influere,  to  flow  in),  was  at 
first  a  term  of  astrology,  and  meant  the  ema- 
nation from  the  stars  to  men  of  an  ethereal 
fluid,  which  affected  their  characters  and 
fates;  and  our  modern  word  influenza  em- 
bodies the  old  belief  that  epidemics  were 
caused  by  astral  influence.  Disaster  and  ill- 
starred  need  no  explanation;  ascendant ^  pre- 
dominant, conjunction,  and  opposition  are 
other  words  of  astrology;  aspect  meant  origi- 
nally the  way  the  planets  look  down  on  the 
earth;  and  men  derived  their  dispositions 
from  the  "dispositions"  or  situations  of  their 
native  planets.  Even  our  current  word  motor 
has  descended  to  earth  from  the  heavens,  for 
it  was  first  used  to  describe  the  primus  motor 
or  primum  mobile,  the  imaginary  tenth  sphere, 
added  by  the  Arabian  philosopher  Avicenna, 
to  the  nine  spheres  of  the  Greeks. 


178        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Amalgam,  alembic,  alkali,  arsenic,  tartar,  are 
alchemists'  words  which  made  their  first 
EngUsh  appearance  in  the  XlVth  Century; 
quintessence,  which  appears  a  httle  later,  was 
another  alchemists'  term,  describing  the 
imaginary  fifth  essence  added  by  Aristotle  to 
the  four.  Earth,  Air,  Fire,  Water,  of  the  early 
Greek  philosophers.  The  XTVth  Century 
word  test,  and  the  later  alcohol,  are  also  terms 
of  alchemy.  Alcohol  meant  originally  a  fine 
powder;  and  test  is  derived  (through  testum) 
from  the  Latin  word  testa,  an  earthen  vessel  or 
pot,  which,  through  ancient  slang,  has  become 
tete,  the  French  word  for  "head."  It  was 
used  by  the  alchemists  to  describe  the  metal 
vessel  in  which  they  made  their  alloys.  From 
such  a  phrase  as  Shakespeare's  tested  gold  has 
arisen  the  verb  to  test,  which  is  now  commonly 
used  in  England,  although  it  was  regarded  as 
an  Americanism  not  many  years  ago. 

The  names  of  the  seven  liberal  sciences  of 
medieval  teaching,  the  "arts"  of  the  univer- 
sities, Grammar,  Logic,  Rhetoric,  Arithmetic, 
Geometry,  Music,  Astronomy,  were  early 
adopted  into  English  from  the  Latin  in  which 
they  were  taught,  and  with  them  came  in  the 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        179 

Xlllth  and  XlVth  Centuries  a  number  of 
terms  of  learning  and  culture,  such  as  melody ^ 
rhyme,  comedy,  tragedy,  theatre,  philosophy,  and 
history.  These  words  belonging  as  they  do  to 
the  culminating  period  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
may  be  associated  with  the  rich  and  decorated 
forms  into  which  Gothic  architecture  flowered 
at  about  the  same  period. 

The  learning  and  science  of  the  Middle 
Ages,  or  at  least  that  part  of  it  which  was 
assimilated  during  the  Xlllth  and  XlVth 
Centuries  into  EngHsh  thought,  can  be, 
perhaps,  as  fairly  estimated  by  the  lists  of 
these  learned  borrowings  as  by  any  other 
method.  Some  of  them  were  no  doubt  mere 
ink-horn  terms,  and  had  no  current  use  at 
that  time  outside  the  books  in  which  they 
are  found;  the  greater  part  appear,  however, 
in  the  works  of  popular  writers  like  Chaucer 
and  Gower,  and  so  must  have  become  familiar 
to  the  educated  contemporaries  of  the  poets. 

An  etymological  analysis,  moreover,  of  this 
vocabulary  of  medieval  culture  will  show, 
with  surprising  accuracy,  the  sources  from 
which  that  culture  was  derived,  and  the 
channels  through  which  it  passed  on  its  way 


180        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

to  England.  We  find  in  the  first  place  that 
practically  all  these  words  were  borrowed 
from  the  French;  that  the  French  borrowed 
them  from  Latin,  and  that,  with  the  exception 
of  some  Arabian  words,  the  ultimate  source  of 
almost  all  of  them  was  Greek.  They  repre- 
sent, indeed,  the  wrecks  and  fragments  of 
Greek  learning  which  had  been  absorbed  into 
Koman  dvihzation,  and  which,  after  the  de- 
struction of  the  classical  world,  were  handed 
on  through  the  Dark  Ages  from  compilation 
to  compilation,  growing  dimmer  and  more 
obscure,  more  overlaid  with  errors  and  fan- 
tastic notions,  in  this  process  of  stale  repro- 
duction. Such  as  it  was,  however,  this  body 
of  learning,  derived  for  the  most  part  from 
abridgments  of  Aristotle,  was  not  questioned; 
medieval  science  was  based,  not  on  the  obser- 
vation of  Nature,  but  on  the  study  of  the 
ancients;  and  a  writer  of  natural  history  in 
this  period  felt  it  necessary  to  quote  the  au- 
thority of  Aristotle  in  support  of  so  elemen- 
tary a  statement  as  that  eggs  are  hardened 
by  heat,  or  hatched  by  the  brooding  of  their 
female  parents. 

In  the  Xinth  Century,  however,  this  body 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES       181 

of  learning  had  been  much  increased  by  a 
great  accession  from  Arabian  sources.  We 
have  already  mentioned  the  effect  of  the  first 
contact,  during  the  Crusades,  between  the 
East  and  West;  by  means  of  the  peaceful 
intercourse  which  followed,  Europe  drew 
immense  profit  from  the  high  culture  of  the 
civilized  Arabs,  who,  in  the  East  or  in  Spain, 
kept  the  torch  of  learning  alight,  while  Em-ope 
was  still  enveloped  in  comparative  darkness. 
The  Arabs  had  preserved  through  Syriac 
versions  the  works  of  Aristotle,  and  much  of 
the  astronomical  and  medical  learning  of 
ancient  Greece;  in  the  Xlllth  Century  this 
body  of  learning  reached  Europe  by  means  of 
translations  from  Arabic  into  Latin.  This 
accession  of  knowledge  from  Eastern  sources 
accounts  for  the  greater  part  of  the  Arabic 
words  adopted  into  English.  ZerOy  almanaCy 
algebra,  cipher,  azimuth,  nadir,  zenith,  alembic, 
alkali,  camphor,  alcohol,  amber,  are  Arabian 
words.  Alchemy,  alembic,  and  perhaps  amal- 
gam, are  Greek  words  given  an  Arabic  shape 
by  passing  through  that  language.  The  rest 
of  this  early  vocabulary  comes  in  the  main, 
as  has  been  said,  from  Greek  sources.    The 


182        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

names  of  jewels  and  precious  materials,  of 
animals  real  or  imaginary,  are  Greek;  pard 
and  sappkiret  and  perhaps  tiger,  ebony,  beryl, 
and  jasper,  are  words  early  borrowed  by  the 
Greeks  from  Oriental  languages;  alabaster 
and  ammoniac,  and  perhaps  alchemy,  came  to 
Greece  from  Egyptian  sources;  while  ostrich 
is  a  hybrid  word,  formed  in  popular  Latin 
from  the  Latin  avis,  and  strouthion,  the  Greek 
name  for  ostrich. 

The  medical  vocabulary  is  for  the  most  part 
Greek,  and  the  Latin  medical  words  are 
in  the  main  translations  from  Greek.  The 
vocabulary  of  astronomy  is  more  largely 
Latin;  but  almost  all  these  words  also  are 
direct  translations  from  Greek,  and  are  no 
proof  of  additions  made  by  the  Romans 
to  this  science.  Save  in  war,  pohtics,  law,  and 
agriculture,  the  practical  and  unimaginative 
Romans  made  few  or  no  additions  to  culture; 
and  the  study  of  languages,  as  well  as  other 
studies,  leads  us  sooner  or  later  back  to 
Greece,  to  the  art  and  thought  of  that  smaM 
and  ancient  people,  from  which  almost  all 
that  is  highest  in  our  civilization  descends. 

There  is,  however,  one  more  department  of 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        183 

medieval  thought  which,  owing  to  its  effect 
on  English  life  and  language,  must  by  no 
means  be  omitted  in  this  hasty  survey.  This 
is  the  study  of  logic,  which  more  than  any 
other  subject  absorbed  the  intellectual  ener- 
gies of  the  Middle  Ages.  Philosophy  was  in  a 
sense  the  passion  of  the  Xlllth  Century  in 
Europe,  when  Scholasticism  formed  the  mould 
of  thought  which  lasted  till  the  revival  of 
learning.  About  Scholasticism,  with  its  quib- 
bles and  quiddities,  there  still  lingers  much 
of  the  ridicule  poured  on  it  at  the  Renais- 
sance, and  this  is  no  place  to  do  justice  to 
this  great  medieval  effort  to  understand  the 
metaphysical  basis  of  thought,  and  to  recon- 
cile reason  and  the  Christian  faith.  It  can 
only  be  said  that  there  can  be  no  more  per- 
vasive, permanent,  and  important  influence 
on  civilization  than  metaphysical  discussion, 
barren  and  abstract  and  fruitless  as  it  at  first 
appears.  In  the  scholastic  disputes  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  habits  of  accurate  reasoning 
were  formed;  the  intellect  was  trained  to  deal 
with  abstract  ideas,  and  terms  were  borrowed 
or  coined  for  their  expression.  Preachers, 
educated  not  in  secluded  monasteries,  but  in 


184        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

secular  universities,  visited  or  took  up  their 
residence  in  English  villages,  and  through 
their  sermons  familiarized  their  hearers  with 
at  least  some  of  the  great  abstractions  and 
distinctions  of  Aristotelian  thought.  By  this 
means,  and  by  means  of  the  lawyers,  and  of 
Wyclif 's  popular  writings,  a  great  part  of  the 
scholastic  terminology  was  absorbed  into 
the  English  language.  Indeed,  our  present 
vocabulary  of  philosophic  terms  is  very  largely 
a  production  of  Scholasticism,  and  owes  its 
admirable  clearness  and  definiteness  to  the 
hard-thinking  of  these  old  logicians,  and 
already  in  the  XTTTth  and  XlVth  Centuries 
we  find  in  EngKsh  writings  such  words  as 
accidenty  absolute,  apprehension,  attribute, 
cause,  essence,  existence,  matter  and  form,  qual- 
ity and  quantity,  general  and  special,  object 
and  subject,  particular  and  universal,  substance, 
intelligence,  and  intellect. 

Medieval  philosophy,  like  the  rest  of 
medieval  learning,  can  make  no  great  claims 
to  originality;  its  basis  was  the  Aristotelian 
logic,  and  its  vocabulary,  although  almost 
entirely  Latin,  was  formed  for  the  most  part 
by  the  literal  translation  into  Latin  of  Aris- 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        185 

totelian  terms.  It  cannot,  however,  be  said 
that  Scholasticism  made  no  contributions  to 
human  thought;  the  distinction,  for  instance, 
between  Free  Will  and  Determinism  was  not 
clearly  defined  in  Greek  philosophy,  but  was 
fully  developed  by  the  medieval  philosophers 
and  theologians.  Predestination  is  a  word  first 
found  in  St.  Augustine,  and  Free  Will  an 
Enghsh  translation  of  the  Latin  phrase  of  a 
Church  Father.  By  means,  moreover,  of  the 
disputations  and  the  subtle  distinctions  of  the 
scholastic  logicians,  much  that  was  latent  or 
obscure  in  Greek  philosophy  was  brought 
into  greater  clearness;  and  a  large  number  of 
words  were  formed  in  Low  Latin  to  express 
these  conceptions  and  distinctions.  Entity 
and  identity y  majority  and  minority,  duration, 
existence,  ideal,  individual,  real  and  reality, 
intuition,  object,  motive,  tendency,  predicate,  are 
among  the  words  that  Enghsh  owes  to  late, 
and  not  to  classical  Latin.  Our  word  premise 
or  premises  is  a  term  of  logic,  which  came  into 
use  originally  as  the  translation  into  Latin  of 
an  Arabic  word  meaning  "put  before."  From 
the  premises  of  a  syllogism,  it  acquired  a  legal 
meaning,  and  used  for  "the  aforesaid"  in 


186        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

legal  documents,  it  soon  was  applied  to  "the 
aforesaid  houses,  lands  or  tenements"  men- 
tioned in  the  "premises"  of  the  deed,  and  so 
acquired  its  present  use  of  a  house  with  its 
grounds  or  other  appurtenances. 

Whenever,  indeed,  a  large  number  of  new 
words,  however  learned  and  abstract  their 
character,  make  their  appearance  in  a  lan- 
guage, the  genius  of  popular  speech  is  sure  to 
appropriate  some  of  them,  in  its  own  illogical 
and  often  absurd  way,  to  its  own  practical 
uses.  We  are  all  familiar  with  the  "horn" 
of  a  dilemma,  though  few  of  us  trace  it  to 
the  argumentum  comutum  of  scholastic  argu- 
ment. Quiddity  is  a  scholastic  word,  and 
perhaps,  quandary  also;  and  even  the  modern 
locomotive  is  formed  from  the  medieval  trans- 
lation of  a  phrase  of  Aristotle.  Species,  one 
of  the  great  words  of  scholastic  logic,  was 
soon  appropriated  in  the  early  form  of  sjnce 
by  the  medieval  druggists  to  describe  the 
four  kinds  of  ingredients  in  which  they 
traded — saffron,  cloves,  cinnamon,  and  nut- 
megs. But  the  main  agents  in  the  distribu- 
tion of  these  words  were  the  lawyers  of  the 
Middle  Ages.    Scholastic  words  and  scholastic 


DARK  AND  MIDDLE  AGES        187 

distinctions  found  their  way  into  Anglo- 
French,  and  then  into  English.  "While  as 
yet  there  was  little  science  and  no  popular 
science,"  Prof.  Maitland  writes,  "the  lawyer 
mediated  between  the  abstract  Latin  logic  of 
the  schoolmen  and  the  concrete  needs  and 
homely  talk  of  gross,  unschooled  mankind. 
Law  was  the  point  where  life  and  logic  met.'* 
If,  therefore,  we  were  to  study  the  history 
of  almost  any  of  the  great  terms  of  ancient 
or  medieval  philosophy,  and  trace  all  the 
varied  and  often  remote  uses  to  which  it  has 
been  applied,  we  should  be  able  to  observe  the 
effect  of  the  drifting  down,  into  the  popular 
consciousness,  of  the  deJBnitions  of  high  and 
abstract  thought.  We  should  find  that  many 
of  our  commonest  notions  and  most  obvious 
distinctions  were  by  no  means  as  simple  and 
as  self-evident  as  we  think  them  now,  but 
were  the  result  of  severe  intellectual  struggles 
carried  on  through  hundreds  of  years;  and 
that  some  of  the  words  we  put  to  the  most 
trivial  uses  are  tools  fashioned  long  ago  by 
old  philosophers,  theologians,  and  lawyers, 
and  sharpened  on  the  whetstone  of  each 
other's  brains. 


188        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 


CHAPTER  Vm 

LANGUAGE  AND  HISTORY — THE  MODERN 
PERIOD 

By  the  end  of  the  XlVth  Century  the  Eng- 
lish language  had  absorbed  into  itself  the 
greater  part  of  the  vocabulary  of  medieval 
learning,  and  had  been  formed  into  a  standard 
and  Hterary  form  of  speech  for  the  whole 
nation.  But  from  the  point  of  view  of  vocab- 
ulary, the  XVth  Century  marks  a  pause. 
England,  exhausted  and  demoraHzed  by  its 
disastrous  conflicts  abroad  in  France,  and  by 
the  Wars  of  the  Roses  at  home,  had  little 
energy  to  devote  to  the  higher  interests  of 
civilization;  literature  languished,  and  the 
vocabulary  of  this  period  shows  but  Httle  ad- 
vance on  that  of  the  previous  age.  Some 
medical  and  chemical  terms  were  added  to  it; 
the  poems  of  Lydgate  at  the  beginning,  and 
the  works  printed  by  Caxton  at  the  end  of  the 
century  contain  many  new  words;    but  we 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  189 

cannot  find  in  them  many  signs  of  new  con- 
ceptions, or  of  any  great  additions  to  life  and 
thought. 

Perhaps  the  most  curious  of  these  new 
terms  are  the  words  derived  from  medieval 
games  and  sports,  and  the  large  accession  of 
sea-terms,  borrowed  from  the  Dutch,  which 
make  their  appearance  at  about  this  time. 
Among  hawking  terms  had  already  appeared, 
in  the  previous  century,  the  word  reclaim, 
derived  through  the  French  from  the  Latin 
reclamare.  Reclamare,  however,  meant  in 
Latin  "to  cry  out  against,"  "to  contradict"; 
it  acquired  in  hawking  the  technical  sense  of 
calling  back  a  hawk  to  the  fist,  and  so  the 
notion  of  calling  back  or  "reclaiming"  a 
person  from  a  wrong  course  of  action.  Among 
XVth  Century  hawking  words  may  be  men- 
tioned rebate,  which  meant  to  bring  back  to 
the  fist  a  "bating"  hawk;  to  allure,  from 
the  older  lure  (of  obscure  etymology),  an 
apparatus  for  recalling  hawks,  and  to  rouse, 
used  first  for  the  hawk's  shaking  its  feathers. 
Haggard  is  a  somewhat  later  word,  and  being 
used  of  a  wild  hawk,  has  been  derived  from 
the  French  word  for  hedge,  haie;   but  this 


190        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE, 

etymology  is  doubtful.  Among  early  terms 
borrowed  from  the  chase  is  the  word  to  worry, 
which  meant  "to  seize  by  the  throat,"  and  the 
curious  verb  to  musey  which  is  believed  to  be 
derived  from  the  same  word  as  miizzle,  and 
to  mean  originally  the  action  of  a  dog  holding 
up  his  nose  or  muzzle  to  sniff  the  air  when  in 
doubt  about  the  scent.  The  early  word  scent 
(derived  ultimately  from  the  Latin  sentire) 
was  first  a  hunting  term;  and  the  later  word 
sagacious y  meant  originally  in  English  "acute 
of  scent."  Retrieve y  the  French  retrouver,  is 
also  a  hunting  term,  and  our  verb  to  abet  is 
supposed  to  come  through  the  French,  from 
the  Norse  beita,  "to  cause  to  bite";  and  if 
so  is,  perhaps,  like  tryst,  another  hunting  term, 
one  of  the  few  Scandinavian  words  preserved 
by  the  Normans  after  their  settlement  in 
France.  Its  original  meaning  was  "to  bait 
or  hound  dogs  on  their  prey";  and  then,  from 
the  action  of  inciting  some  one  to  commit 
a  crime,  it  acquired  its  present  meaning.  A 
relay  was  originally  a  set  of  fresh  hounds 
posted  to  take  up  the  chase;  a  couple  was  a 
leash  for  holding  two  hounds  together;  ruse 
(which  is  the  same  word  as  rush)  was  a  dou- 


i 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  191 

bling  or  turning  of  the  hunted  animal ;  and  the 
hounds  were  said  to  run  riot  when  they  fol- 
lowed the  wrong  scent.  Our  verb  to  rove  is  a 
term  of  XVth  Century  archery,  obscure  in 
origin;  it  meant  originally  to  shoot  arrows  at 
a  mark  selected  at  random,  and  has  no  con- 
nection with  rover y  a  sea-term  word  borrowed 
from  the  Dutch,  and  cognate  with  our  old 
word  reaver  or  robber. 

These  words  give  us  a  little  glimpse  into  the 
sports  of  our  medieval  ancestors;  and  we  may 
add  to  them  the  verb  to  check  or  checkmate,  a 
chess  term,  derived  through  the  Arabian  from 
the  Persian  Shah  or  king.  The  later  terms 
derived  from  sports  are  bias,  the  colloquial 
phrase  to  howl  over,  and  the  word  rub  in  the 
famihar  phrase  "there's  the  rub" — all  from 
the  game  of  bowls:  while  crestfallen  and 
white  feather  come  to  us  from  the  cockpit. 

Our  language  shows  the  close  connection 
that  existed  from  early  medieval  times,  be- 
tween England  and  the  Low  Countries.  Pack 
(from  which  package  and  packet  are  derived) 
is  an  early  word  in  English,  used  in  the  wool 
trade,  and  apparently  came  to  us  in  the  Xllth 
or  Xlllth  Century  from  the  Dutch  or  Flemish 


192        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

traders.  SpooU  stripe,  and  the  verb  to  scour 
are  thought  to  be  technical  terms  brought 
by  the  Flemish  workmen  whom  Edward  III 
settled  in  England  to  improve  English  manu- 
factures. Tub  and  scum  are  possibly  early 
brewing  terms  borrowed  from  the  Dutch  or 
Flemish,  like  the  word  hops,  which  came  to 
us  from  the  Low  Countries  in  the  XVth  Cen- 
tury. But  many  of  the  most  important  Dutch 
words  in  English  are  sea-terms;  indeed,  our 
nautical  vocabulary  is  largely  Dutch  in  origin, 
and  shows  how  much  our  eariy  sailors  owed 
to  the  mariners  and  fishermen  of  the  Low 
Countries.  Among  the  words  that  have  been 
traced,  with  more  or  less  certainty,  to  Dutch, 
Flemish,  or  Low  German  sources,  bowsprit  and 
shipper  are  found  in  the  XlVth  Century,  while 
in  the  XVth  appear  hoy,  pink,  scout,  keel,  and 
lighter,  for  the  names  of  boats;  pump  and  leak 
(both  first  found  in  nautical  use),  orlop,  mar- 
line, freight,  and  buoy.  The  connection  be- 
tween Dutch  and  English  sailors  long  remained 
a  close  one,  and  among  later  additions  to  the 
Enghsh  sea-vocabulary  which  are  probably 
Dutch  in  origin,  arc  reef,  belay,  dock,  mesh, 
aloof,  and  flyboat,  which  appear  in  the  XVIth 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  193 

Century;  and  the  XVIIth  Century  words 
sloo'Pi  yacht,  commodore,  yawl,  cruise  and 
cruiser,  bow  &VL&hoom,keelhaul,  gybe,  and  avast. 
If  the  XVth  Century  made  but  few  addi- 
tions to  the  vocabulary  of  EngHsh  thought  and 
culture,  the  century  that  followed  this  period 
of  intellectual  barrenness  was  one  of  unex- 
ampled richness  and  splendour.  It  was  in  this 
century  that  the  effects  of  revival  of  learning 
reached  England,  and  the  study  of  classical 
Latin  and  Greek  soon  exerted  a  powerful 
influence  on  the  language.  Although  the 
learned  words  borrowed  in  the  XlVth  Cen- 
tury were  most  of  them  ultimately  derived 
from  classical  antiquity,  they  may  yet  be 
compared  to  the  architectural  forms  and 
ornaments  which  were  borrowed  by  Gothic 
architecture  from  Roman  buildings,  but  which 
were  transformed  and  assimilated  by  the 
Gothic  spirit.  These  words  were  Greek  or 
Roman  in  origin,  but  medieval  in  sentiment 
and  meaning,  and  served,  like  the  borrowed 
architectural  forms  and  ornaments,  to  build 
up  the  great  religious  and  Gothic  edifice  of 
medieval  thought.  But  now,  just  as  classical 
forms  began  to  replace  Gothic  architecture,  so 


194        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Latin  and  Greek  words  began  to  appear  in 
English,  not  borrowed  through  the  medium  of 
Low  Latin  or  medieval  French,  but  taken 
direct  from  the  classics.  We  note  in  this 
century  the  appearance  of  many  Renaissance 
words  like  Arcadian,  Dryad,  Hesperian,  Ely- 
sian,  which  brought  with  them  the  echoes  of 
the  great  poetry  of  Greece  and  Rome.  At  the 
same  time  a  secular  meaning  was  given  to 
many  old  words  which  had  had  hitherto  only 
a  religious  use  and  signification. 

It  was,  indeed,  in  this  century  that  the 
foundations  were  laid  of  the  new  and  modem 
world  in  which  we  live;  old  words  were  given 
new  meanings,  or  borrowed  to  express  the  new 
conceptions,  activities,  and  interests  which 
have  coloured  and  formed  the  life  of  the  last 
three  centuries.  To  the  more  fundamental  of 
these  conceptions,  and  their  immense  effect  on 
the  vocabulary  of  English,  we  must  devote  a 
special  chapter;  but  first  it  will  be  well  to 
mention  the  deposit  of  words  left  in  the  lan- 
guage by  the  various  historical  and  religious 
movements  and  events  of  the  XVIth  and  the 
succeeding  centuries. 

The  first  great  modern  movement  was,  of 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  195 

course,  the  Protestant  Reformation.  The 
name  Protestant  came  to  England,  probably 
from  Germany,  the  old  word  Reformation  was 
given  a  new  use,  and  the  derivatives  reformed 
and  reformer  were  made  from  it.  Evangelical 
and  sincere  were  new  words  much  used  by 
Protestants  of  their  doctrines;  and  now,  by 
their  unfortunate  identification  of  the  Hebrew 
Sabbath  with  the  Christian  Sunday^  they 
fastened  on  that  day  the  sabbatic  law  of  the 
Old  Testament.  Godly  in  its  modern  sense  is 
first  found,  with  the  new  derivatives,  godliness 
and  godless,  in  Tindale's  writings;  religion, 
which  was  used  before  of  rites  and  observ- 
ances or  of  monastic  orders,  was  given  by  the 
Protestants  its  new  and  important  abstract 
meaning  of  belief,  and  the  state  of  mind  it 
induces;  pious  was  another  of  their  new  words, 
and  the  old  piety,  which  had  been  sometimes 
used  for  pity,  acquired  from  them  its  modern 
meaning.  These  words  are  a  testimony  of  the 
new  and  inner  reHgious  life  of  the  Protestants; 
and  the  Roman  Catholic  words  mission  and 
missionary  (which  were  first  used  of  the 
Jesuit  missions)  show  the  zeal  of  their  oppo- 
nents.   This  zeal  showed  itself  also  in  a  new 


196        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

crop  of  controversial  words;  pernicUms,  faction, 
and  factions  first  appear  in  the  writings  of 
Catholic  controversialists,  who,  however,  were 
soon  eclipsed  by  the  superior  linguistic  powers 
of  the  Protestants.  It  is  in  terms  of  abuse,  as 
we  have  already  noticed,  that  the  gift  for 
language  is  most  vigorously  displayed;  and 
Tindale,  Coverdale,  and  Latimer,  to  whom  the 
English  Bible  and  the  Church  Service  owe  so 
much,  made  liberal  use  also  of  their  word- 
creating  faculty  to  invent  terms  of  obloquy 
for  those  who  opposed  their  views. 

Dunce  (which  was  derived  from  the  name 
of  the  scholastic  philosopher,  Duns  Scotus) 
first  appears,  with  Romish,  popery,  popisk- 
ness,  in  the  works  of  Tindale.  Duncely, 
monkery,  popishly,  were  used  by  Latimer; 
Luther's  word  Romanist  was  apparently  intro- 
duced by  Coverdale,  who  also  seems  to  have 
invented  for  his  own  use  duncical,  Babylonical, 
and  Babylonish.  Other  terms  of  Protestant 
vituperation  which  belong  to  this  period  are 
Babylonian,  malignant,  papish,  papistical, 
monkish,  with  terms  that  are  now  obsolete, 
such  as  popeling,  duncery,  and  the  once  com- 
mon abbey-lubber.     Bigoted  and  bigotry  are 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  197 

words  of  Protestant  abuse  of  a  somewhat  later 
date.  The  history  of  Roman  Catholic  is  a 
curious  one.  The  terms  Roman,  Romanist, 
and  Romish,  had  acquired  by  the  end  of  the 
XVIth  Century  so  invidious  a  meaning,  that 
the  need  for  a  non-controversial  term  was  felt, 
and  Roman  Catholic  was  adopted  for  this  pur- 
pose. It  was  employed,  as  the  Oxford  Dic' 
tionary  states,  for  conciliatory  reasons  in  the 
negotiations  for  the  Spanish  marriage  of 
Charles  I,  and  thus  found  its  way  into 
general  use. 

While  still  engaged  in  their  quarrel  with  the 
old  faith,  the  Protestants  soon  began  those 
controversies  among  themselves  by  which  the 
English  vocabulary  has  been  enriched;  and 
already  in  the  XVIth  Century  we  note  the 
words  Puritan,  precise,  and  'precision,  and  also 
libertine,  which  was  first  used  as  the  name  of 
the  antinomian  sect  of  Anabaptists.  Repro- 
bate is  a  sinister  word  which  belongs  to  this 
period,  being  a  Calvinist  term  for  souls  re- 
jected by  God,  and  foredoomed  to  eternal 
misery. 

To  turn,  however,  from  these  old  contro- 
versies to  secular  matters,  we  find  that  the 


198        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

English  language  became,  after  the  middle 
of  the  XVIth  Century,  greatly  enriched  by 
far-fetched  and  exotic  words,  gathered  from 
the  distant  East  and  West  by  the  English 
travellers,  merchants,  and  adventurous  pirates. 
The  EngHsh  people,  who  had  so  long  used  their 
energies  in  the  vain  attempt  to  conquer 
France,  found  now  at  last  their  true  vocation 
in  seamanship,  and  their  true  place  of  expan- 
sion in  the  trade,  and  finally  the  empire,  of 
India  and  America.  The  exotic  words  that  had 
found  their  way  into  EngHsh  before  this  date, 
had,  as  we  have  seen,  come  almost  entirely  at 
second  hand  by  the  way  of  France;  but  now 
that  England  was  forming  a  more  independent 
civihzation  of  her  own,  and  Englishmen  were 
getting  for  themselves  a  wider  knowledge  of 
the  world,  the  French  influence,  although  still 
strong,  was  not  paramount,  and  these  trav- 
ellers* words  were  borrowed  either  directly 
from  native  languages,  or  from  the  speech  of 
the  Portuguese,  Dutch,  and  Spaniards,  who 
had  preceded  English  sailors  in  the  distant 
countries  of  the  East  and  West.  Of  our  words 
belonging  to  this  period,  and  derived  from  the 
languages  of  India  and  the  Far  East,  calico 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  199 

was  taken  from  the  name  of  Calicut;  coolie 
and  curry  seem  to  have  come  through  Portu- 
guese; the  Malayan  words  bamboo,  cockatoo 
through  Dutch,  junk  through  Spanish  or 
Italian,  and  gong  (another  word  from  Malay) 
was  probably  a  direct  borrowing.  Indigo  is 
from  Portuguese;  monsoon  is  beheved  to  be 
an  Arabian  word,  but  it  came  to  us  from  the 
Dutch,  who  had  borrowed  it  from  the  Portu- 
guese. Typhoon  is  also  Arabian,  but  ulti- 
mately Greek  in  origin.  From  the  near  East, 
coffee  is  an  Arabian,  and  dervish  a  Persian 
word,  reaching  us  through  Turkish,  while 
harem  and  hashish  and  magazine  were  bor- 
rowed direct  from  Arabian.  Banana  is  sup- 
posed to  be  a  native  African  word  from  the 
Congo  district;  it  reached  us,  like  negro, 
through  Portuguese  or  Spanish.  The  early 
words  from  the  languages  of  the  West  Indies, 
Mexico,  and  South  America,  all  come  to  us,  as 
we  might  expect,  from  the  language  of  the 
early  Spanish  conquerors  and  explorers  of  these 
countries.  Alligator  is  a  popular  corruption 
of  the  Spanish  name  for  the  lizard,  el  or 
al  lagarto;  chocolate,  cocoa,  tomato,  are  Mexi- 
can; cannibal,  hurricane,  hammock,  savannah. 


200        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

maize y  Caribbean  words;  while  canoe ,  tobacco, 
and  potato  are  from  the  island  of  Hayti,  and 
guano  from  Peru.  All  these  come  to  us 
through  the  medium  of  Spanish. 

Cannibal  and  canoe  are  of  interest  to  us,  as 
words  brought  back  to  Europe  by  Christopher 
Columbus;  and  in  cannibal,  as  in  the  name 
West  Indies,  and  in  Indian  for  the  American 
aborigines  is  embodied  the  geographical  error 
of  the  time,  when  Columbus  beheved  that  in 
his  voyage  across  the  Atlantic  he  had  reached 
what  are  now  called  the  East  Indies.  For 
when  he  heard  the  name  Caniba  (which  is 
simply  a  variant  of  Carib  or  Caribes)  he 
thought  that  it  signified  that  this  savage 
people  were  subjects  of  the  Grand  Khan  of 
Tartary,  whose  domains  he  beheved  to  be  not 
far  distant.  Other  words  associated  with 
early  travellers  are  mulatto,  which  is  first 
found  in  the  account  of  Drake's  last  voyage, 
and  breeze,  which  in  the  XVIth  Century  was 
an  adaptation  of  the  Spanish  briza,  a  name 
for  the  north-east  trade-wind  in  the  Spanish 
Main,  and  which  first  appears  in  the  account 
of  one  of  Hawkins's  voyages.  With  these  old 
sailors'  words  we  may  associate  the  words 


THE  MODERN    PERIOD  201 

brought  back  to  England  by  Captain  Cook 
from  the  Pacific  in  the  XVIIIth  Century, 
tattoo,  kangaroo,  and  taboo.  Sassafras  seems 
to  be  the  earhest  word  borrowed  from  North 
America  (if,  indeed,  it  be  not  a  corruption  of 
the  Latin  saxifraga),  and  came  into  EngHsh 
through  the  Spanish.  The  XVIIth  Century 
words  from  North  America,  moccasin,  persim- 
mon, opossum,  tomahawk,  hickory,  terrapin, 
were  borrowed  directly  from  Indian  speech  by 
the  English  settlers  of  North  America. 

There  is  much  in  the  history  and  etymology 
of  words  that  is  merely  curious  and  quaint, 
and  possesses  little  but  an  archaeological 
interest.  That  trowsers  should  be  traced  back 
to  the  Greek  thyrsos,  and  that  hanjo  and 
goloshes  should  also  be  able  to  boast  of  an 
illustrious  Greek  descent,  is  certainly  in- 
teresting; but  these  associations  can  do  but 
little  to  add  poetic  dignity  to  such  words. 
Other  words  there  are  that  gain  immensely  in 
value  when  we  know  their  history;  and  among 
them  must  be  counted  these  exotic  words  of 
Elizabethan  travel  and  adventure,  cannibal, 
hurricane,  alligator,  savannah,  breeze,  monsoon; 
and  we  still  may  feel  some  of  the  strangeness 


202        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

of  remote  people  and  places  that  echoed  in 
them,  when  far-travelled  seamen  brought 
them  back  to  Enghsh  seaports  from  the 
Indian  Ocean  or  the  Spanish  Main. 

To  the  war  with  Spain  in  the  reign  of 
Elizabeth  we  owe  the  Spanish  words  embargo 
and  contraband,  and  the  Dutch  word  free- 
hooter.  Among  other  Dutch  or  Flemish  terms 
that  were,  perhaps,  brought  back  to  England 
by  soldiers  from  their  campaigns  in  the  Low 
Countries  may  be  meiitioned  furlough,  cashier, 
leaguer,  sconce,  onslaught,  drill,  and  domineer. 
Comrade  is  a  Spanish  word,  but  seems  to  have 
been  a  soldiers'  term  leamt  in  the  Low  Coun- 
tries; and  forlorn  hope  is  a  military  phrase, 
being  the  Dutch  verloren  hoop,  in  which  hoop 
means  a  troop,  and  is  cognate  with  our  word 
"heap." 

The  separation  from  Rome,  the  founding 
of  a  National  Church,  the  war  with  Spain,  and 
the  great  victory  over  the  Armada,  did  much 
to  awaken  Englishmen  to  a  sense  of  national 
pride  and  consciousness.  In  the  Middle  Ages 
England  shared  in  the  cosmopolitan  civili- 
zation of  Europe,  with  its  Catholic  Church 
and  its  ideal  of  a  universal  empire;  dynastic 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  203 

pretensions  were  paramount  to  those  of 
nationality,  and  even  the  claim  of  English 
kings  to  the  French  Crown  was  supported  by 
a  considerable  part  of  the  population  of  that 
country.  But  in  the  XVIth  Century  the 
ideal  of  nationahty,  of  political  unity  and 
independence,  began  to  take  the  prominent 
place  in  men's  thoughts  and  feelings  which 
it  has  since  preserved,  and  we  can  trace  this 
growth  in  the  curiously  late  appearance 
in  the  English  language  of  what  we  may 
call  "patriotic"  terms.  Nation  was  an  early 
word,  but  it  was  used  more  with  the  notion 
of  different  races  than  that  of  national  unity, 
and  was  indeed  commonly  employed  to  de- 
scribe any  class  or  kind  of  persons.  It  gained 
its  present  meaning  in  the  XVIth  Century, 
and  late  in  that  century  we  find  the  adjective 
national  formed  from  it;  and  we  can  note  at 
about  the  same  date  the  appearance  of  such 
terms  as  fellow-countryman  and  mother-coun- 
try. Fatherland  and  compatriot  appear  a  little 
later,  and  patriot  and  patriotic  belong  to  the 
middle  of  the  XVIIth  Century,  but  did  not 
acquire  their  present  meaning  until  a  hundred 
years  later,  at  which  time  patriotism  is  found. 


204        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

Public  in  the  sense  of  "public-spirited" 
belongs  to  the  early  XVIIth  Century,  but 
public-spirit  and  public-spirited  are  somewhat 
later. 

If  we  turn  to  literature,  we  find,  as  we  might 
expect,  that  the  age  of  Skakespeare  brought 
with  it  a  large  accession  to  our  literary 
vocabulary,  lyric^  epic,  dramatic,  blank  verse, 
fiction,  and  critic.  We  note,  too,  in  the  XVIth 
Century,  the  beginning  of  our  modem  politi- 
cal vocabulary;  political  itself  belongs  to  this 
period,  and  politics,  and  politician  (in  the 
older  and  more  dignified  meaning  of  states- 
man) and  Secretary  of  State  and  the  adjective 
parliamentary.  This  political  vocabulary  was 
largely  increased  with  the  growth  of  political 
institutions  in  the  XVIIth  Century.  The 
words  politician  and  minister  began  to  acquire 
their  present  meaning  in  its  eariier  years,  and 
legislator  was  borrowed  from  Latin  in  the 
same  period.  Cabinet  Council  was  apparently 
introduced  at  the  accession  of  Charles  I  in 
1625,  and  we  hear  of  the  Cabinet  about  twenty 
years  later.  Privy  Councillor  and  cabal  belong 
to  the  period  of  the  Civil  War  and  the  Common- 
wealth; and  the  phrase  the  Army  came  gradu- 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  205 

ally  into  use  with  the  formation  of  a  standing 
army  at  this  time,  and  was  first  applied  to  the 
ParKamentary  forces  in  1647.  We  can  trace, 
too,  to  this  period,  the  first  beginnings  of  the 
vocabulary  of  modern  democracy.  Populace 
was,  indeed,  borrowed  in  the  XVIth  Century 
by  means  of  France  from  the  Italian  popo- 
lacdoy  but  like  other  Italian  words  ending  in 
acdo,  it  was  a  term  of  abuse;  "the  populace  '* 
was  used  in  England  as  an  equivalent  for 
"mob"  or  "rabble";  and  the  adjective 
popular  had  something  of  the  same  depreci- 
atory meaning.  The  people,  however,  in  its 
modern  sense  appears  during  the  Civil  War, 
when  Parliament  made  a  solemn  declaration 
that  "the  people  are,  under  God,  the  original 
of  all  just  power."  It  was  at  this  time,  too, 
that  the  late  Latin  word  radical,  used  first  in 
medieval  physiology  for  the  inherent  or 
"radical"  humours  of  plants  and  animals, 
and  in  the  XVIth  Century  appHed  to  mathe- 
matics and  philology,  came  to  acquire  some- 
thing of  its  modern  meaning  of  "fundamen- 
tal" or  "thorough."  It  was,  however,  at  this 
time  a  theological  term,  being  used  in  the 
Puritan  phrase  radical  regeneration.    It  was 


206        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

not  definitely  applied  to  politics  till  about 
1785,  and  soon  became,  in  the  reaction  after 
the  French  Revolution,  a  term  of  low  re- 
proach, more  or  less  equivalent  to  "black- 
guard"— a  meaning  it  is  said  still  to  preserve 
in  some  remote  or  exalted  regions. 

Scriptural  is  a  Puritan  word  of  the  XVTIth 
Century;  and  so  also  are  independent  and  in- 
dependencey  which  soon  acquired  a  political 
meaning;  while  demagogue  is  a  Royalist  term 
which  first  appeared  in  the  Eikon  Basilike. 
As  this  defence  of  Charles  I  was  supposed  at 
the  time  to  have  been  written  by  the  King 
himself,  the  great  word-coiner  Milton,  in  his 
answer  to  it,  abused  it  as  a  "goblin  word,'* 
and  declared,  somewhat  illiberally,  that  the 
King  could  not  "coin  English  as  he  could 
money."  Plunder  is  a  German  word  mean- 
ing originally  "bedclothes"  or  "household 
stuff";  it  was  much  used  during  the  Thirty 
Years'  War,  and  became  familiar  on  the  out- 
break of  the  Civil  War,  being  especially 
connected  with  Prince  Rupert's  raids — the 
"plunderous  Rupertism"  of  Carlyle's  eccen- 
tric coining.  Tory  was  originally  a  term  of 
reproach  for  the  half-savage  bog-trotters  in 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  207 

Ireland  supposed  to  be  in  the  King's  service; 
Royalist  and  Roundhead  date,  of  course,  from 
this  period;  Cavalier  was  adopted  by  the 
Puritans  as  a  term  of  abuse  for  the  swash- 
bucklers on  the  King's  side,  to  whom  also 
applied  the  Protestant  word  malignant.  Prel- 
atry,  prelatize,  goosery,  fustianist,  were  terms 
coined  in  the  controversies  of  this  time  by 
Milton,  who  was  as  highly  gifted  for  vitupera- 
tion as  he  was  for  poetry.  Sectarian  was  first 
used  by  the  Presbyterians  for  the  Independ- 
ents, but  was  soon  applied  by  the  AngHcans 
to  the  Nonconformists.  Cant,  as  we  use  it 
now,  and  fanatic  are  abusive  terms  intro- 
duced by  the  Royalists;  and  although  they 
were  defeated  in  the  field,  we  must  on  the 
whole  give  them  the  crown  of  victory  in  this 
linguistic  contest,  as  their  terms  of  vitupera- 
tion have  been  more  widely  accepted,  and 
have  gained  a  much  larger  circulation  than 
those  of  their  Puritan  opponents. 

At  the  Restoration,  when  Charles  11  re- 
turned to  England,  he  brought  the  spirit  of 
mockery  with  him;  and  in  the  reaction 
against  the  austerity  and  zeal  of  the  pious 
Puritans,  a  large  number  of  mocking  words 


208        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

arose  or  became  current.  To  this  period 
belong  the  verbs  to  burlesque,  to  banter,  to 
droll,  to  ridicule;  nouns  like  travesty,  badinage, 
and  adjectives  like  jocose  and  teasing  in  their 
modern  use;  while  prig  was  borrowed  from 
rogue's  cant  to  describe  a  Puritan  or  a  non- 
conformist minister.  As  typical  of  this  time 
we  may  quote  Anthony  a  Wood's  description 
in  1678  of  a  new  set  in  academic  circles,  the 
"banterers  of  Oxford,"  "who  make  it  their 
Employment  to  talk  at  a  Venture,  lye,  and 
prate  what  Nonsense  they  please;  if  they  see 
a  Man  talk  seriously,  they  Talk  floridly 
Nonsense,  and  care  not  what  he  says;  this  is 
like  throwing  a  Cushion  at  a  Man's  Head, 
that  pretends  to  be  grave  and  wise." 

Of  the  more  serious  side  of  the  Restoration 
period,  the  immense  revolution  in  thought 
caused  by  the  foundation  at  that  time  of 
modern  science,  and  the  growth  of  a  scien- 
tific vocabulary  and  of  a  scientific  view  of 
the  world,  we  shall  speak  in  another  chapter; 
there  remain,  however,  a  few  words  in  which 
are  embedded  events  or  aspects  of  XVIIth 
Century  history.  Bivouac,  like  "plunder,"  is 
a  word  that  arose  in  the  Thirty  Years'  War, 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  209 

although  it  did  not  come  into  English  un- 
til the  beginning  of  the  XVIIIth  Century; 
campaign^  recruit,  commander-in-chiefs  and 
the  military  sen^e  of  capitulation  appear  in 
the  Civil  War;  and  many  other  military 
terms,  parade,  pontoon,  patrol,  bombard,  can- 
nonade, barracks,  brigadier,  fusilier,  etc.,  were 
borrowed  in  the  later  part  of  the  XVIIth 
Century  from  the  French,  who  were  now  the 
masters  in  the  military  art,  as  indeed  in  most 
of  the  arts  at  this  period.  Refugee  came  into 
the  language  with  the  Huguenot  refugees; 
excise  is  apparently  a  Dutch  word  and,  al- 
though borrowed  earlier,  came  into  general 
use  when  this  system  of  taxation  was  bor- 
rowed from  Holland  in  1643;  it  long  remained 
unpopular,  and  Dr.  Johnson  defined  it  in  his 
Dictionary  as  a  "hateful  tax,"  "levied  by 
wretches."  Drub,  used  originally  of  the  bas- 
tinado, is  supposed  to  be  an  Arabic  word, 
brought,  in  the  XVIIth  Century,  from  the 
Barbary  States,  where  so  many  Christians 
suffered  captivity,  and  where  they  learnt  the 
expression  from  the  cudgelling  of  their  Moham- 
medan captors.  We  can  trace,  moreover,  to 
the  XVIIth  Century  the  beginnings  of  our 


210        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

modem  commerical  vocabulary.  Capital^ 
investmentt  dividend  belong  to  the  earlier, 
insurance,  commercialy  and  discount  to  the  later 
part  of  the  century,  and  the  great  words 
bank,  machine,  and  manufacture  begin  to 
acquire  their  modem  meaning. 

This  commercial  vocabulary  was  largely 
increased  in  the  XVHEth  Century;  bank- 
ruptcy, banking,  currency,  remittance,  appear 
before  1750;  in  this  period  the  old  word 
buMuess  acquires  its  present  meaning,  and 
we  hear  of  bulls  and  bears,  and  of  trade  being 
dull  or  brisk.  After  1750  consols,  finance, 
appear,  and  bonu^  and  capitalist.  The  vo- 
cabulary, too,  of  modern  poUtics  grows  with 
the  development  of  poHtical  institutions;  we 
hear  of  the  Ministry  in  the  reign  of  Queen 
Anne,  of  the  Premier  in  that  of  George  I, 
while  in  the  early  years  of  George  II's  reign 
the  administration,  the  budget,  the  estimates 
appear,  with  party,  as  the  word  is  now  used. 
Prime  Minister  was  borrowed  from  the  courts 
of  despotic  sovereigns  and  applied  to  Walpole 
as  an  abusive  terai,  but  this  title  was  expressly 
disowned  by  him,  as  it  was  by  Lord  North 
under  George  HI.    It  fell  more  or  less  out 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  211 

of  use,  being  replaced  by  Premier  or  First 
Minister^  until  about  the  middle  of  the 
XlXth  Century,  and  it  only  received  official 
recognition  in  1905. 

At  the  end  of  the  XVIIIth  Century  and  the 
beginning  of  the  XlXth,  some  of  the  vocab- 
ulary of  the  French  Revolution  was  im- 
ported into  England;  aristocracy  came  now  to 
be  contrasted,  not  with  monarchy,  but  democ- 
racy; the  words  aristocrat  and  democrat  were 
borrowed  from  French,  and  the  old  word  des- 
pot  acquired  its  present  hostile  meaning,  and 
despotism  was  enlarged  from  the  rule  of  a 
despot  to  any  arbitrary  use  of  unhmited 
power.  The  verb  to  revolutionize  and  the 
slightly  later  terrorize,  with  royalism  and 
terrorism,  are  words  of  the  French  Revolution; 
conscription  gained  its  present  meaning  from 
the  conscriptions  of  the  French  Republic, 
and  section  in  its  geographical  use,  and  the 
XlXth  Century  word  sectional,  are  derived 
from  the  division  of  France  into  electoral 
sections  under  the  Directory. 

Even  the  most  superficial  survey,  however, 
of  the  XVIIIth  Century  must  not  be  dis- 
missed without  a  reference  at  least  to  its 


212        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

contributions  to  our  vocabulary  of  literature 
and  social  life.  Literature  itself  only  acquired 
the  sense  of  literary  production  in  this  cen- 
tury, and  literary  (which  is  not  included  in 
Johnson's  Dictionary)  has  till  this  time  only 
the  meaning  of  "alphabetical."  Of  new- 
formed  words,  or  old  words  that  acquired 
their  present  meanings  between  1700  and 
1800,  may  be  mentioned  editor,  novelist, 
magazine,  publisher,  copyright,  the  verb  to 
review,  and  the  great  word  the  Press.  Of 
social  life,  in  this  Golden  Age  of  good  society, 
we  find,  as  we  might  expect,  many  new  char- 
acteristic terms,  the  words  season,  polite,  and 
club  take  on  new  meanings,  we  hear  of  callers 
and  visiting  cards;  and  the  inmiense  number 
of  compounds  formed  from  the  word  "tea" 
(tea-room,  tea-party,  tea-drinker,  etc.)  would 
afford  much  material  for  the  student  of  social 
customs.  In  the  new  compounds,  moreover, 
which  were  now  formed  from  the  old  word  sea 
(sea-beach,  sea-bathing,  the  adjective  seaside, 
and  the  use  of  sea-air  as  a  cause  not  of  sick- 
ness but  of  health)  he  would  find  evidence  of 
that  discovery  of  the  sea  as  a  source  of  pleas- 
ure and  well-being  which  we  also  owe  to  this 


THE  MODERN  PERIOD  213 

period.  The  earlier  sea-terms  in  English,  sea- 
man, seafaring,  seacoast,  etc.  (many  of  which 
date  from  the  Anglo-Saxon  period),  are  all  of 
a  practical  and  unromantic  character.  The 
Renaissance  compounds,  sea-green,  sea-god, 
sea-nymph,  are  translations  from  the  classics, 
and  show  the  influence  of  the  classical  feeling 
for  the  sea.  Although  Shakespeare's  epithets 
for  the  sea,  rude,  dangerous,  rough,  etc.,  are 
generally  hostile,  he  yet  shows  in  such  adjec- 
tives as  silver  and  multitudinous,  and  in 
phrases  like  beached  margent  and  yellow  sands, 
a  sense  of  its  beauty  beyond  that  of  most  of 
his  contemporaries.  The  popular  love,  how- 
ever, for  the  sea  and  its  shores  dates  from  the 
XVIIIth  Century,  and  finds  its  latest  expres- 
sion in  XlXth  Century  compounds  like  sea- 
smell  and  sea-murmuring,  which  we  owe  to 
Tennyson. 

The  XlXth  Century  has  provided  us  with 
an  amazing  wealth  of  characteristic  terms; 
and  a  chronological  list  of  these,  and  of  the 
ones  which  have  made  their  appearance  since 
1900,  would,  if  we  had  space  to  give  it,  show 
us  a  curious  picture  of  our  own  age,  and  all  its 
interests  and  developments.     But  there  is 


214        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

another  aspect  of  the  subject  which  is 
even  more  important — the  development,  as 
mirrored  in  our  language,  of  modem  ways 
of  thought  and  feeUng — and  to  this  we  must 
devote  our  last  chapter. 


CHAPTER  IX 

LANGUAGE   AND   THOUGHT 

If  we  were  given  what  purported  to  be 
a  transcript  of  a  medieval  manuscript,  and 
should  find  in  it  words  like  enlightenment  or 
scepticisviy  we  should  not  hesitate  to  pro- 
nounce it  a  glaring  and  absurd  forgery;  and 
we  should  reject  with  equal  promptness  a 
pretended  Elizabethan  play  in  which  we  came 
upon  such  phrases  as  an  exciting  event,  an 
interesting  personality,  or  found  the  characters 
speaking  of  their  feelings.  Or  when  we  read 
in  the  famous  cryptogram,  supposed  to  have 
been  inserted  by  Bacon  in  Shakespeare's  and 
his  own  writings,  of  secret  interviews,  tragedies 
of  great  interest,  and  disagreeable  insinuationSt 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   215 

we  begin  to  doubt  Bacon's  authorship  of  these 
phrases;  a  doubt  which  is  considerably 
strengthened  when  we  find  him  speaking  of 
his  affaires  de  coeur  and  the  lone  garden  of 
his  heart.  These  are  extreme  instances;  but 
there  are  thousands  of  other  words  and 
phrases  which  we  feel  belong  to  definite 
periods,  and  would  never  have  been  used  at 
an  earlier  date.  The  reason  for  our  feeling 
is  only  to  a  slight  extent  philological;  as  far 
as  their  form  is  concerned,  the  greater  part 
of  these  words  would  have  been  perfectly 
possible — it  is  in  their  meanings,  the  thoughts 
they  express,  that  they  are  such  obvious 
anachronisms. 

This  curious  sense  of  the  dates  of  words, 
or  rather  of  the  ideas  that  they  express, 
comes  to  us  from  our  knowledge,  grown  half- 
instinctive,  of  the  ways  of  thought  dominant 
in  different  epochs,  the  "mental  atmos- 
phere" as  we  call  it,  which  made  certain 
thoughts  current  and  possible,  and  others  im- 
possible at  this  time  or  that.  This  study  of 
the  social  consciousness  of  past  ages  is  perhaps 
the  most  important  part  of  history;  changes 
of  government,  crusades,  rehgious  reforms. 


216        THE  ENGLISH   LANGUAGE 

revolutions — all  these  are  half-meaningless 
events  to  us  unless  we  understand  the  ideas, 
the  passions,  the  ways  of  looking  at  the 
world,  of  which  they  are  the  outcome.  It  is 
also  the  most  elusive  thing  in  history;  we  gain 
enough  of  it,  indeed,  from  literature  to  make 
us  aware  of  any  glaring  anachronism;  but  we 
are  too  apt  to  read  back  modern  conceptions 
into  old  words,  and  it  is  one  of  the  most  diffi- 
cult of  mental  feats  to  place  ourselves  in  the 
minds  of  our  ancestors,  and  to  see  life  and  the 
world  as  they  saw  it.  It  is  here  that  language 
can  give  the  most  important  aid  to  history; 
if  we  know  what  words  were  current  and 
popular  at  a  given  period,  what  new  terms 
were  made  or  borrowed,  and  the  new  mean- 
ings that  were  attached  to  old  ones,  we  become 
aware,  in  a  curiously  intimate  way,  of  interests 
of  that  period.  We  cannot,  it  is  true,  always 
trace  by  means  of  language  the  ultimate 
source  of  all  new  ideas;  they  may  have  been 
inherited  from  Greece  or  Rome,  they  may 
have  been  discovered  by  some  pioneer  long 
before  they  became  current;  but  the  date  at 
which  they  are  absorbed  into  the  common  con- 
sciousness is  shown  fairly  accurately  by  the 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   217 

new  words  to  which  they  give  birth,  or  the 
change  in  meaning  which  they  produce  in  old 
ones.  One  of  the  best  tests  of  the  importance 
and  popularity  of  words  is  the  number  of  com- 
pounds and  derivatives  which  in  a  given 
period  are  formed  from  them.  We  find,  for 
instance,  that  many  compounds  from  the 
word  church  {church-belly  church-door,  church- 
book,  etc.)  were  formed  in  the  Anglo-Saxon 
period,  that  many  derivatives  were  formed 
from  court  and  crown  (courtier,  courteous, 
courtesy,  crowning,  crownment),  in  the  Xlllth 
Century,  and  that  religious  words  Kke  bless 
and  damn  also  produce  many  new  terms  in 
the  early  Middle  Ages.  On  the  other  hand, 
an  old  word  like  rational,  which  dates  from  the 
XlVth  Century,  forms  no  derivatives  until 
the  XVIIth,  when  we  find  rationalist,  rational- 
ity, and  several  others;  while  rationalism, 
rationalize,  rationalistic,  belong  to  the  XlXth 
Century. 

Taking,  then,  this  test  of  language,  and 
relying  in  particular  on  those  words  that 
take  root  and  multiply  at  various  periods,  let 
us  start  with  the  Middle  Ages  and  see  what 
fight  we  can  get  on  the  growth,  through  the 


218        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

intervening  centuries,  of  our  modem  view  of 
ourselves  and  the  universe. 

It  is  a  commonplace  to  say  that  the  domi- 
nant conception  of  modern  times  is  that  of 
science,  of  immutable  law  and  order  in  the 
material  universe.  This  great  and  fruitful  con- 
ception so  permeates  our  thought,  and  so 
deeply  influences  even  those  who  most  opp)Ose 
it,  that  it  is  difficult  to  realize  the  mental  con- 
sciousness of  a  time  when  it  hardly  existed. 
But  if  we  study  the  vocabulary  of  science,  the 
words  by  which  its  fundamental  thoughts 
are  expressed,  we  shall  find  that  the  greater 
part  of  them  are  not  to  be  found  in  the  Eng- 
lish language  a  few  centuries  ago;  or  if  they 
did  exist,  that  they  were  used  of  religious 
institutions  or  human  affairs;  and  that  their 
transference  to  natural  phenomena  has  been 
very  gradual  and  late.  Order  is,  indeed,  a 
very  old  word  in  English,  and  appears  in  the 
Xinth  Century  in  reference  to  monastic 
orders,  and  the  heavenly  hierarchy.  Thrones, 
Dominations,  Powers,  etc.,  of  Christian  the- 
ology. It  acquires  some  notion  of  fixed  ar- 
rangement in  the  XTVth  Century,  but  it  is  not 
till  the  XVIth  Century  that  its  derivatives 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   219 

orderliness  and  orderly  are  found.  Ordered 
meant  "in  holy  orders"  till  this  period,  when 
we  also  find  the  noun  disorder.  Regular  is  a 
XlVth  Century  word,  but  was  also  used  of 
monastic  orders  (being  the  opposite  of  secular) 
until  1584;  while  regularity,  regulation^  and 
the  verb  to  regulate  belong  to  the  following 
century.  Method  and  system  are  also  modem 
words,  with  the  adjectives  methodical,  syste- 
matic,  and  uniform.  The  verb  to  arrange  is 
an  old  word,  and  was  used  like  array  in  a 
military  sense;  but  it  does  not  appear  in 
Shakespeare  or  the  Bible,  and  did  not  acquire 
its  present  meaning  until  the  XVIIIth  Cen- 
tury, at  which  time  arrangement  is  also  found. 
The  verb  to  classify,  with  classification, 
belongs  to  the  XVIIIth  Century,  organism 
to  the  XVIIth,  at  which  time  the  shghtly 
earher  organize  and  organization  acquired 
their  present  meanings. 

If  we  take  the  great  word  law,  we  do  not 
find  it  applied  in  English  to  natural  phe- 
nomena before  the  Restoration,  although  its 
Latin  equivalent  lex  was  employed  in  this 
sense  by  Bacon  earlier  in  the  XVIIth  Century. 
The  Roman  and  medieval  phrase  natural 


220        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

law  {lex  naturae  or  naturalis)  meant  the  law 
of  God  implanted  in  the  human  reason  for 
the  guidance  of  human  conduct;  and  even 
the  laws  of  nature^  by  those  who  first  used  the 
phrase  in  our  modern  sense  were,  as  the 
Oxford  Dictionary  tells  us,  regarded  as  com- 
mands which  were  imposed  by  the  Deity  upon 
matter,  and  which,  as  we  still  say,  were 
"obeyed"  by  phenomena. 

Many  other  instances  could  be  given,  but 
the  above  will  suffice  to  show  how  the  notion 
of  law  and  order  in  nature  and  visible  phe- 
nomena spread  in  the  XVIth  and  XVIIth 
Centuries,  replacing  the  older  notions  of 
magic  or  divine  interference.  Partly  pro- 
duced by  this  sense  of  law  and  order  in  nature, 
and  probably  still  more  the  cause  of  it,  we 
notice  also,  at  this  time,  a  great  increase  in 
the  vocabulary  of  observation.  Speaking 
generally,  the  names  of  the  abstract  reasoning 
processes — reason,  cogitation,  intuition,  etc., 
belong  to  the  Middle  Ages,  while  those  which 
describe  the  investigation  of  natural  phe- 
nomena belong  to  the  modern  epoch,  or  only 
acquire,  at  that  time,  their  present  meaning 
and  their  popular  use.    To  observe  meant  to 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   221 

obey  a  rule,  or  to  inspect  auguries  for  the 
purpose  of  divination,  until  the  XVIth  Cen- 
tury, when  it  acquired  the  meaning  of 
examination  of  phenomena;  observant  and 
observation  were  old  reHgious  words  meaning 
the  obedience  to  religious  laws,  until  the  same 
time;  perception  meant  the  collection  of  rents 
until  the  XVIIth  Century,  and  scrutiny  was 
only  used  of  votes  until  that  period.  Experi- 
ment and  experimental  are  old  words  used  in 
alchemy,  but  experiment  as  a  process  (as  in 
the  phrase  to  try  by  experiment)  is  modern, 
and  experimental  had  hardly  more  than  the 
vague  meaning  of  "observed"  until  the 
XVIth  Century.  The  verbs  to  analyse,  to 
distinguish^  to  investigate,  appear  in  the  same 
period,  and  in  the  next  hundred  years  to 
remark,  to  inspect,  to  scrutinize;  to  notice  is 
an  old  verb  meaning  "to  notify,"  but  it  fell 
out  of  use,  and  was  only  revived  and  given 
its  present  meaning  in  America  at  about  the 
middle  of  the  XVIIIth  Century.  We  may 
also  note  that  while  words  expressing  beHef — 
certainty,  assurance,  credence,  etc.,  are  gener- 
ally old  in  the  language,  those  that  suggest 
doubt,  questioning,  and  criticism,  almost  all 


222        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

belong  to  the  modem  period.  Doubt  is,  of 
course,  an  old  theological  word,  and  doubt- 
ful appears  in  the  XTVth  Century;  but  doubt- 
fulness, dubimis,  dubiou,sness,  dubitable,  with 
sceptic,  sceptical,  scepticism,  are  of  modern 
formation;  and  in  this  period,  too,  the  old 
verbs  to  dissent  and  disagree  became  applied 
to  matters  of  opinion  or  conviction. 

This  conception  of  order  in  the  material 
universe,  and  the  spirit  of  investigation  and 
inquiry,  resulted  of  course  in  a  great  increase 
of  knowledge  about  natural  phenomena.  This 
increase  of  knowledge,  and  its  popular  dif- 
fusion, shows  itself  very  clearly  in  the  large 
number  of  words  that  now  come  into  use  to 
describe  the  quahties  of  matter.  We  note  in 
the  XVIth  Century  a  new  use  of  words  like 
tenacity  and  texture,  while  in  the  following 
century  we  find  cohesion,  tension,  elasticity, 
and  temperature.  At  this  time,  too,  the  word 
force  acquired  its  physical  meaning;  and 
energy,  a  word  of  Aristotle's  creation,  which 
was  first  employed  in  English  as  a  term  of 
literary  criticism,  was  applied  to  the  material 
world,  although  its  precise  modem  use  was 
not  defined  before  the  XlXth  Century. 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   223 

But  it  would  be  outside  our  scope  to  trace 
in  detail  the  formation  of  the  vocabulary  of 
modern  science;  we  can  only  note  that  the 
experimental  study  of  nature  began,  in 
modem  Europe,  in  the  XVIth  Century,  and 
that  many  observations  were  made,  and 
much  material  collected;  and  that  then, 
after  the  check  caused  by  the  Civil  War, 
when  men's  minds  were  turned  at  the  Resto- 
ration from  theological  controversies  to  the 
afifairs  of  this  worid,  an  immense  and  un- 
precedented advance  was  suddenly  made  in 
scientific  knowledge.  All  the  somewhat  dis- 
connected observations  collected  by  previous 
generations  were  now  ordered  and  systema- 
tized, and  modem  science  sprang  into  exist- 
ence and  began  to  extend  its  domain  over 
the  whole  universe. 

But  this  conception  of  science  was  not  so 
much  a  new  discovery  as  the  revival  of 
ancient  thought  which  found,  at  the  Renais- 
sance, an  atmosphere  favorable  to  its  fruitful 
development.  The  order,  however,  which  the 
ancients  found  in  the  universe  was  a  fixed  and 
unchangeable  one;  the  belief  in  progressive 
change,  in  evolution,  is  modern,  and  forms. 


224        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

perhaps,  the  most  essential  diflFerence  between 
our  view  of  the  world  and  that  of  the  Greeks 
and  Romans.  We  do  not,  perhaps,  always 
realize  how  very  modem  the  conception  is, 
but  if  we  take  the  words  by  which  it  is  ex- 
pressed— advance^  amelioration,  development^ 
improvemenU  progress,  evolution,  we  shall  find 
that  none  of  them  can  be  found  in  English 
with  their  present  meaning  before  the  XVIth 
Century.  Advance  and  advancement  are  old 
words  in  English,  with  the  meaning  of  pro- 
motion from  a  lower  to  a  higher  oflBce;  and 
only  acquire  the  sense  of  progress  after  the 
Middle  Ages.  Improve  and  improvement 
were  terms  of  Law  French,  originally  em- 
ployed to  describe  the  process  of  enclosing 
waste  land  and  bringing  it  into  cultivation; 
they  acquire  the  sense  of  "making  better"  in 
the  XVIIth  Century,  and  one  of  the  earUest 
uses  of  "improve,"  with  this  modern  mean- 
ing, is  found,  appropriately  enough,  in  the 
title  of  "the  Royal  Society  of  London  for 
Improving  Natural  Knowledge,"  founded 
about  1660. 

Evolution  is,  of  course,  a  modern  word  in 
English;  it  appeared  first  in  a  mihtary  sense 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   225 

in  the  XVIIth  Century,  and  acquired  its 
present  meaning  and  its  immense  develop- 
ment from  the  work  of  Darwin  and  Herbert 
Spencer  in  the  XlXth  Century.  Indeed,  it 
is  not  too  much  to  say  that  although  the 
Middle  Ages  had  words  like  regeneration  and 
amendment,  with  reference  to  the  notion  of 
personal  conduct  and  its  reform,  there  were 
at  that  time  no  general  terms  to  express  the 
ideas  of  continuous  improvement,  of  advance 
to  better  and  better  conditions.  The  reason 
that  there  were  no  such  terms  is,  of  course, 
that  they  were  not  needed.  The  idea  of 
progress  may  have  visited  the  thoughts  of 
a  few  lonely  philosophers,  but  it  obtained 
no  general  acceptance,  and  found  no  expres- 
sion in  the  language.  The  social  conscious- 
ness was  not  favorable  to  it,  being  dominated 
as  it  was  by  the  religious  belief  in  the  degen- 
eracy of  a  world  fallen  from  grace,  and  fated 
to  worse  deterioration  before  its  sudden  end, 
which  might  come  at  any  time.  Even  at  the 
Reformation  the  ideal,  as  the  word  Reforma- 
tion shows,  was  that  of  a  return  to  the  purity 
of  primitive  and  uncorrupted  times;  and  the 
conception  of  continuous  evolution,  of  an 


226        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

advance  beyond  the  limits  set  by  the  past, 
is  one  which  has  appeared  at  a  late  period  in 
the  history  of  thought.  Indeed,  the  appli- 
cation of  this  thought  to  human  society,  the 
belief  in  human  progress,  hardly  became 
diffused  and  popular  before  the  middle  of 
the  XVUlth  Century.  Progress  is  an  old 
word  for  a  journey,  a  "royal  progress";  it 
began  to  acquire  the  meaning  of  continuous 
improvement  in  the  time  of  Shakespeare,  at 
which  time  the  verb  to  progress  appeared,  and 
the  adjective  progressive,  which  was  used  by 
Bacon  in  his  Essays.  The  verb,  however, 
became  obsolete  in  English,  and  was  intro- 
duced again  from  America  after  the  notion 
of  progress,  taken  into  their  systems  and 
popularized  by  the  XVIILth  Century  philos- 
ophers had  found  its  way  into  the  popular 
imagination,  and  had  given  birth  to  the 
great  new  hope  of  modern  times,  the  modern 
belief  that  human  society  is  advancing,  or 
can  advance,  to  better  and  better  conditions. 
We  have  given  a  summary  account,  in  the 
previous  chapter,  of  the  deposits  left  by 
various  historical  events  in  the  Enghsh  lan- 
guage— of   words    as   historical    documents. 


1 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   227 

Still  more  interesting  is  the  evidence  of  lan- 
guage about  the  growth  of  the  sense  of  history 
itself,  the  change  that  the  modern  conceptions 
of  order  and  progress  have  produced  in  our 
way  of  regarding  past  ages.  If  we  examine 
our  historical  vocabulary,  the  words  and 
phrases  by  which  we  express  our  sense  that 
the  past  was  not  the  same,  but  something 
different  from  the  present,  we  shall  find  that 
they  are  all  of  them  modern,  and  most  of 
them,  indeed,  of  very  recent  introduction. 
Men  in  the  Middle  Ages  were  fully  conscious 
of  antiquity;  but,  save  for  the  sense  of  in- 
creasing deterioration,  no  clear  distinction 
existed  in  the  popular  mind  between  the 
life  of  the  present  and  the  past;  feudal  in- 
stitutions and  medieval  ways  of  thought 
were  attributed  to  the  Greeks  and  Romans, 
who  were  always  pictured  as  dressed  in 
medieval  costumes.  Probably  the  first  word 
in  which  our  modern  historical  sense  finds 
expression  is  the  word  pHmitive,  as  applied  by 
the  Reformers  to  the  early  Church.  Indeed, 
the  effect  of  the  Reformation,  in  turning  men's 
thoughts,  not  only  to  past  events,  but  to  the 
customs  and  institutions  of  earlier  ages,  did 


228        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

much  to  create  a  sense  of  history.  This  was 
increased  by  the  revival  of  learning,  and  a 
truer  understanding  of  classical  times;  the 
distinction  between  ancient  and  modem  ap- 
pears in  Bacon's  writings;  and  the  word 
classicaly  with  something,  though  by  no  means 
all,  of  the  meaning  we  give  it,  is  found  not 
much  later.  The  Puritans,  by  adopting  from 
the  Church  Fathers  the  distinction  between 
the  Old  and  the  New  Testament  dispensa- 
tions, increased  the  sense  of  historical  perspec- 
tive, and  the  words  epoch,  century,  decade, 
with  the  adjectives  antiquated,  primeval, 
Gothic,  old-fashioned,  out-of-date,  show  its 
growth  and  spread  in  the  XVIIth  Century. 
It  is  not,  however,  till  the  XV  111th  Century 
that  the  sense  of  the  past  embodies  itself  in 
phrases  like  the  Middle  Ages,  the  Dark  Ages, 
the  Revival  of  Learning,  while  medieval,  feudal- 
ism, Elizabethan,  the  Renaissance,  belong  to 
the  XlXth  Century.  Anachronism  was  used 
in  the  XVIIth  Century  for  an  error  in  com- 
puting time;  its  modern  meaning,  first  found 
in  Coleridge,  is  very  significant,  and  convey- 
ing as  it  does  the  idea  of  a  thing  which  is 
appropriate  to  one  age,  but  out  of  harmony 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   229 

with  another,  it  expresses  a  thought,  a  way  of 
feehng,  which  is  very  modern,  and  which 
would  not  have  needed  expression  at  an  earher 
period.  The  latest  addition  to  our  historical 
vocabulary  is  the  word  prehistoric,  which  is 
first  found  in  1851,  and  which  represents  the 
opening  up  of  an  immense  new  field  of  investi- 
gation, the  history  of  mankind  before  the 
existence  of  written  records. 

With  this  growing  sense  of  the  past,  and  its 
difference  from  the  present,  we  find,  as  we 
might  expect,  the  growth  of  a  romantic  and 
sentimental  attitude  towards  bygone  ages  of 
English  history.  The  earher  attitude  of  the 
XVnith  Century  toward  the  Middle  Ages, 
which  is  expressed  in  phrases  Hke  the  Dark 
Ages,  and  barbarous  or  Gothic,  to  describe 
everything  medieval,  was  not  long  after 
succeeded  by  the  Romantic  movement,  and 
its  revival,  which  we  have  already  mentioned, 
of  old  and  half-forgotten  words.  But  these 
words  of  the  Romantic  revival — chivalry, 
chivalrous,  minstrel,  bard,  etc.,  have  now  taken 
on  a  romantic  glamom*  they  by  no  means 
originally  possessed.  Minstrel  was  a  name 
for  a  buffoon  or  juggler,  as  well  as  a  musician 


230        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

in  early  times;  while  hard,  as  a  name  for  a 
Gaelic  singer,  was  used,  with  "beggar"  and 
"vagabond,"  as  a  term  of  contempt,  imtil  it 
became  associated  with  the  classical  use  of 
the  same  word,  and  was  idealized  by  Sir  Wal- 
ter Scott.  Our  modem  use  of  chivalry  as  an 
ideal  of  conduct  dates  no  further  back  than 
Burke*s  famous  phrase,  "The  age  of  chivalry 
is  gone.** 

The  above  instances  of  modem  ways  of 
thought  and  feeling  will  give  us  some  slight 
notion  of  the  words  we  must  delete  from  our 
vocabulary,  the  ideas  we  must  dismiss  from 
our  mind,  should  we  wish  to  enter  into  the 
spirit  and  popular  consciousness  of  the  Middle 
Ages.  Should  we  succeed  in  our  attempt,  we 
should  find  ourselves  in  a  world  strangely 
different  from  the  world  which  modem 
thought  has  created  for  us — a  world  not 
governed  by  impersonal  law,  but  expressing 
supernatural  purpose,  and  subject  to  constant 
supernatural  intervention.  The  sense  of  past 
and  future,  the  looking  before  and  after  of 
modem  times,  the  historical  sense,  which 
makes  the  past  so  different  from  the  present, 
and  fills  our  minds  with  speculations  and 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   231 

ideals  for  the  future,  would  drop  from  us. 
The  present  would  be  for  us  the  same  as  the 
past,  and  our  future  prospect  would  be  that 
of  a  more  or  less  swift  destruction  of  the  world 
and  human  society.  Our  modem  universe  is  a 
vast  process  of  ordered  change  and  regular 
development;  theirs  was  a  definite  and  almost 
unchanging  creation,  formed  in  a  moment  out 
of  nothing,  and  destined  to  end  as  suddenly 
as  it  began.  But  perhaps  what  would  impress 
us  most  would  be  the  absorption  of  thought  in 
immediate  practical  considerations,  the  ab- 
sence of  curiosity  about  natural  objects,  save 
in  so  far  as  they  ministered  to  man's  service. 
We  should  find  that  the  movements  of  heav- 
enly bodies  were  mainly  of  interest  for  their 
supposed  effect  on  the  destinies  of  human 
beings;  the  plants  that  were  useful,  or  sup- 
posed to  be  useful  in  medicine  and  magic, 
were  the  ones  that  were  known  and  named; 
zoology  was  important  for  the  moral  lessons 
to  be  drawn  from  the  ways  of  animals, 
mineralogy  consisted  largely  in  a  knowledge 
of  the  magical  powers  of  jewels,  chemistry 
was  pursued  for  the  purpose  of  transmuting 
metals  into  gold;  and  even  the  philosophy  of 


232        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

the  Middle  Ages  was  an  effort  not  so  much  to 
arrive  at  truth  as  to  reconcile  reason  and 
revealed  religion.  We  should  find  plenty  of 
speculation  about  the  practical  uses  of  things, 
and  many  words  to  describe  their  nature  from 
this  point  of  view;  but  words  to  describe  their 
qualities,  apart  from  their  uses,  would  be  al- 
most entirely  wanting.  Even  the  vocabulary 
of  another  side  of  disinterested  observation, 
the  sense  of  beauty,  would  be  scanty,  for 
words  like  admiration  and  beaviiful  belong  to 
the  XVIth  Century  and  not  to  the  Middle 
Ages. 

It  is  this  practical  or  utilitarian  spirit  which 
would  probably  most  oppress  us;  and  our 
minds  would  feel  imprisoned  in  the  small  box 
of  the  medieval  universe,  with  its  confining 
spheres,  its  near,  monitory  stars,  and  didactic 
animals.  And  yet,  should  we  thoroughly 
enter  into  the  atmosphere  of  that  time,  and 
find  mankind  and  ourselves,  not  the  tempo- 
rary and  accidental  inhabitants  of  a  remote 
planet,  but  standing  at  the  centre  of  a  uni- 
verse whose  unifying  principle  was  not  me- 
chanical law,  but  justice  and  divine  grace, 
and  whose  end  and  purpose  were  the  fulfilment 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   233 

of  human  destiny,  we  might  feel  that  our  Hfe 
had  gained  a  dignity  and  gravity  which 
modern  science  has  taken  from  it;  and  that 
in  the  spiritual,  and  not  in  the  natural  world, 
was  to  be  found,  after  all,  the  true  home  of 
the  human  soul. 

There  is  another  change  in  our  vocabulary 
pointing  to  a  change  in  thought  and  feeling 
quite  as  profound  as  that  produced  by  science, 
and  the  sense  of  law  and  order  in  the  material 
universe.  The  great  pioneers  of  the  Renais- 
sance discovered  not  only  the  world  of  natural 
phenomena,  but  another  world,  equally  vast 
and  varied  and  new — the  world  of  man.  Man 
had  indeed  been  placed  by  medieval  thought 
at  the  centre  of  the  universe,  and  nature  made 
subservient  to  his  needs,  but  it  was  not  man 
as  he  is  in  himself  that  was  regarded,  but  man 
in  his  relation  to  society  or  the  Church.  The 
natm-al  man,  with  his  individual  variation 
from  the  inherited  type,  was  hardly  con- 
sidered; he  was  subordinated  to  the  great 
and  dominant  scheme  of  theology,  and  he  was 
thought  of  not  so  much  as  a  person  as  of 
a  soul  to  be  saved  or  lost. 

Probably  to  each  of  us  the  sense  of  his  own 


234        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

personality,  the  knowledge  that  he  exists  and 
thinks  and  feels,  is  the  ultimate  and  funda- 
mental fact  of  life.  But  this  sense  of  per- 
sonality, of  the  existence  of  men  as  separate 
individuals,  is  one  of  the  latest  developments 
of  human  thought.  Man  in  early  societies  is 
not  thought  of  as  an  individual,  and  there  are 
savage  languages  that  possess  no  word  for 
"I"  or  for  the  conception  of  "myself."  An 
examination  of  those  words  by  which  we 
express  this  notion  of  personality,  and  their 
history,  will  show  that  this  simple  fundamen- 
tal conception,  like  most  other  simple  con- 
ceptions, was  a  late  fruit  of  daring  thought, 
and  was  only  reached  by  devious  ways,  and 
after  much  abstract  speculation.  The  word 
inditndual  (literally  "inseparable")  was  a 
word  formed  in  scholastic  Latin  from  the 
earUer  individuumy  which  meant  an  indivis- 
ible particle  or  'atom.  Individual  was  used 
in  medieval  logic  for  a  member  of  a  class  or 
species,  and  also  as  a  theological  term  with 
reference  to  the  Trinity,  and  did  not  acquire 
its  present  meaning  in  English  before  the 
time  of  Shakespeare.  The  great  classical  and 
medieval  word  person  has  an  even  more  curi- 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   235 

ous  history.  It  is,  in  its  origin,  one  of  those 
many  words  {scene,  scenery,  landscape,  aUi- 
tvde,  contrast,  character,  expression,  costume^ 
etc.)  which  have  come  to  us  from  the  arts, 
and  show  how  conceptions  and  distinctions, 
first  achieved  by  art,  are  found,  like  those 
thought  out  by  philosophy,  to  be  of  useful 
application  to  life  and  natural  phenomena. 
For  person  was  originally  a  dramatic  term, 
the  Latin  persona  (derived,  it  is  believed, 
from  the  verb  personare,  "to  sound  through") 
meaning  an  actor's  mask.  From  this  it 
acquired  the  meaning  of  actor's  part,  or  of 
one  who  performs  or  acts  any  part,  and  es- 
pecially a  "personage,"  one  who  plays  an 
important  part  on  the  stage  of  life.  Its  next 
meaning  was  legal,  a  man's  personal  rights 
and  duties  which  depend  upon  his  position 
in  life,  and  it  did  not  acquire  the  meaning  of 
an  individual  human  being  till  late  in  Roman 
times.  This  was  probably  helped  by  the  use 
of  the  word  in  Christian  theology  for  a  Per- 
son of  the  Trinity;  and  we  may  say  in  general 
that  the  notion  of  personality,  though  of  Stoic 
origin,  was  greatly  developed  by  Christian 
thought,  with  its  sense  of  the  infinite  worth  of 


«S6        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

the  individual  human  soul.  This  conception, 
then,  had  already  been  achieved  by  medieval 
thought,  and  the  words  'person^  personal^ 
personality,  belong  to  this  period.  They  have, 
however,  received  in  modem  times  an  im- 
mense extension  of  meaning,  and  another 
whole  group  of  words  has  been  created  or 
adopted  to  express  the  various  new  concep- 
tions to  which  the  idea  of  personality  has 
given  birth. 

The  egoy  with  egoism^  are  terms  introduced 
by  French  philosophers  in  the  XVIIth  Cen- 
tury, and  egotism  is  another  French  term. 
These  were  borrowed  at  various  periods; 
egotisniy  which  is  used  by  Addison,  being  the 
first  to  appear  in  English,  while  egotistical 
belongs  to  the  XTKth  Century.  But  before 
this  the  old  word  self,  like  a  germ  that  finds 
a  soil  and  atmosphere  favourable  to  its 
multiplication,  began  to  form  compounds 
in  enormous  quantities.  Self-liking,  self-love, 
self-conceit,  self-assurance,  self-regard,  self-de- 
struction, self-murder,  belong  to  the  later  part 
of  the  XVIth  Century,  and  these  are  followed 
in  the  next  hundred  years  by  self-contempt, 
self -applause,  self-confidence,  self-esteem,  self. 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   237 

defence,  self-command,  and  many  others.  The 
multipHcation  of  these  words  has  gone  on 
steadily  ever  since;  self-help  and  self-assertion 
are  characteristic  of  the  XlXth  Century,  and 
self-culture  has  come  to  us  from  the  strenuous 
cKmate  of  New  England.  Selfish  and  selftsh- 
ness  are  Puritan  words,  formed  by  the  Pres- 
byterians about  1640,  to  express  a  notion  for 
which  the  older  self-love  was  too  vague,  and 
philauty  from  the  Greek,  and  suidsm  from 
the  Latin  too  pedantic  for  popular  accept- 
ance, though  both  of  them  were  tried. 

The  self,  or  ego,  is  not,  however,  a  simple 
object,  but  possesses  many  aspects  and 
attributes.  The  more  abstract  qualities  of 
human  reason  found  their  names  as,  we  have 
seen,  in  scholastic  philosophy,  but  fancy  and 
instinct  belong  to  the  time  of  Shakespeare,  and 
impulse  to  the  XVIIth  Century.  The  dis- 
tinction between  talent  and  genius  is  a  modem 
one,  and  the  evidence  of  language  throws 
considerable  light  upon  its  origin.  The  word 
genius  appears  first  in  English,  early  in  the 
XVIth  Century,  in  the  classical  sense  of  a 
tutelary  god  or  attendant  spirit;  it  then 
acquired   the  meaning   of   the   "spirit"   or 


238        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

distinctive  character  of  an  age  or  institution, 
and  then  of  the  natural  ability  or  capacity  of 
a  man.  Its  modern  use  for  extraordinary  and 
mysterious  creative  power  was  slowly  de- 
veloped in  England  in  the  XVIIIth  Century, 
and  was,  perhaps,  helped  by  the  use  of  genius 
to  translate  the  Arabian  JinUy  the  supernatu- 
ral beings  of  the  Arabian  Nights.  Our  modem 
use  was  not,  however,  recognized  in  Johnson's 
Dictionary,  and  was  only  received  in  its  full 
definition  in  the  Romantic  period  of  Sturm 
und  Drang  in  Germany,  where  the  distinction 
between  genius  and  talent  was  strongly  em- 
phasized, and  whence  it  was  brought  back, 
by  students  of  German  literature,  to  England 
in  the  XlXth  Century.  The  Germans,  on  the 
other  hand,  imported,  in  the  XVIIIth  Cen- 
tury, our  word  original,  which  in  the  phrase 
original  composition  had  recently  acquired  in 
England  a  new  meaning,  and  had  given  birth 
to  the  modem  word  originality.  Our  use  of 
the  old  words  temperament  and  personality,  in 
phrases  such  as  artistic  temperament,  or  a 
strong  personality,  are  still  more  modem,  and 
the  subconscious  or  subliminal  self  are  very 
recent  additions  to  our  vocabulary. 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   239 

But  before  this  conception  of  personality 
found  its  full  development,  the  human  mind 
had  awakened  to  a  vivid  sense  of  the  multi- 
tudes of  individuals,  with  their  various  char- 
acters and  passions,  who  go,  as  we  say,  to 
make  up  the  world.  The  human  vocabulary 
of  the  Middle  Ages  is  somewhat  poor  and 
meagre,  and  it  is  only  now  and  then  in  the 
works  of  a  great  writer  like  Chaucer,  that  we 
get  glimpses  of  the  rich  and  varied  secular 
life  of  this  period.  We  have  names  for 
religious  or  military  characters,  terms  descrip- 
tive of  noble  or  base  condition,  pride  or 
humility,  courage  or  cowardice;  and,  in  addi- 
tion to  the  oldest  feelings  of  human  nature, 
hate,  jear,  love,  and  joy,  we  find  a  large  vocab- 
ulary of  the  emotions  sanctioned  by  religion, 
remorse,  repentance,  anguish,  delight,  despair, 
compunction.  But  when  men  freed  themselves 
from  the  bonds  of  theology,  at  the  same 
time  that  they  broke  through  the  confining 
spheres  of  the  Aristotelian  heavens,  they 
saw  the  whole  universe  of  varied  human 
nature  spread  before  them.  The  human 
intelligence,  like  Adam  naming  the  animals 
in  the  Garden  of  Paradise,  found  terms  for 


240        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

the  secular  characters,  with  their  passions 
and  peculiarities,  which  passed  before  it  in 
motley  procession.  This  process  of  observa- 
tion and  naming  has  continued  ever  since; 
and  a  list  of  these  words,  arranged  accor  ing 
to  the  dates  of  their  appearance,  would  help 
us  to  enter  into  the  feelings  of  the  diflFerent 
generations,  and  to  understand  their  Hkes 
and  dislikes,  and  what  they  thought  worthy 
of  praise  or  condemnation.  Such  a  study 
would,  however,  expand  this  book  to  undue 
proportions,  and  we  will  confine  ourselves 
to  a  short  account  of  the  terms  of  abuse  or 
depreciation,  as  these  are  the  ones  in  which 
the  spirit  of  an  age  mirrors  itself  most  vividly, 
and  in  these,  too,fcthe  genius  of  the  language 
is  most  completely  manifested.  Medieval 
terms  of  abuse — villain,  churl,  boor,  knave — 
are  very  largely  derived  from  the  names  of 
people  in  a  humble  condition,  and  form  a 
striking  opposition  to  kind,  free,  gentle,  gentle- 
man, etc.,  which  signify  noble  birth.  There  is, 
however,  one  word,  dangerous,  which,  like  the 
adjective  proud,  we  may  contrast  with  these. 
For  dangerous  is  derived  ultimately  from  the 
Latin   dominus,  "lord"   or   "master,"   and 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   241 

its  earliest  meaning  in  English  was  that 
of  "haughty,"  "arrogant,"  "difficult."  In 
Chaucer's  time  it  was  used  to  express  another 
aspect  of  lordly  character,  coming  to  mean 
"fastidious,"  "delicate,"  "dainty,"  and  it 
is  not  found  with  the  meaning  of  "perilous" 
or  "risky"  before  the  XVth  Century. 

Among  later  terms,  we  have  already  men- 
tioned those  of  Protestant  controversy,  and 
to  these  may  be  added  the  characteristic 
adjectives,  credulous  and  superstitious,  words 
that,  if  they  had  existed,  would  have  had  no 
abusive  sense  before  the  Reformation.  Of 
words  describing  secular  characteristics,  cold- 
hearted,  affected,  indiscreet,  bold-faced,  and 
moody,  as  we  use  them  now,  are  first  found  in 
Shakespeare,  and  revengeful,  cynical,  absurd, 
also  belong  to  this  period.  In  the  XVIIth 
Century  words,  fanciful,  fatuous,  callous,  dis- 
ingenuous, countrified,  we  find  a  somewhat 
nicer  if  more  superficial  observation;  and, 
omitting  the  Restoration  terms  of  abuse 
(which  have  already  been  mentioned),  we 
notice  in  the  XVIIIth  Century  adjectives, 
prim,  demure,  prudish,  gawky,  bearish,  and 
impolite,  all  of  which  refer  to  qualitites  objec- 


242        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

tionable  in  the  intercourse  of  society,  which 
was  so  highly  developed  in  this  period.  There 
are  two  other  words  that  are  very  character- 
istic of  the  XVinth  Century,  enthusiastic  and 
intolerant.  Enthusiastic  and  the  noun  enthu- 
siasm were  first  used  at  the  English  Renais- 
sance, with  the  historical  and  pagan  meaning 
of  possession  by  a  god  or  divine  frenzy;  but 
they  came  in  the  XVLUth  Century  to  be  abu- 
sive terms  for  religious  fanatics  and  rehgious 
fanaticism,  and  enthusiastic  only  recovered  a 
good  meaning  at  the  more  romantic  end  of 
the  century.  If  enthusiasm  was  repellent 
to  this  "enhghtened"  age,  intolerance y  which 
is  apt  to  accompany  it,  was  equally  repellent; 
and  we  find  that  intolerant  and  intolerance 
both  make  their  appearance  now — indeed, 
there  would  have  been  no  need  for  them  before 
the  Restoration,  nor  would  they  have  been 
abusive  words  at  an  earlier  i)eriod.  These 
XVnith  Century  words  form  a  curious 
contrast  to  the  earlier  terms  of  abuse — mis- 
creant, renegade^  libertine — in  which  wrong  or 
liberal  views  on  religious  subjects  were  taken 
to  imply  moral  delinquency. 

But  the  study  of  human  nature  can  be 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   243 

pursued  from  two  points  of  view;  we  may 
observe  our  fellow-men  and  their  ways  and 
characters;  or  we  may  turn  within  and  study 
our  own  selves.  "Know  thyself"  was  an 
exhortation  inherited  from  antiquity,  but 
its  complete  realization  has  only  been  accom- 
plished in  modern  times.  Speaking  generally, 
we  may  say  that  the  men  of  the  Renaissance 
devoted  their  minds  to  observing  their 
fellow  human  beings;  and  that  men  did 
not  turn  to  the  study  of  themselves,  the 
second  great  chapter  in  the  book  of  life, 
until  more  than  a  century  had  passed.  This 
great  revolution  in  thought — this  discovery 
of  the  inner  life  and  feelings — was  due  to 
many  influences.  Protestantism,  by  making 
the  experience  of  each  individual  the  founda- 
tion of  religion,  was  one  of  its  causes;  and  it 
was  no  doubt  helped  by  the  writings  of  a  man 
like  Montaigne,  who  was  the  first  in  modern 
times  to  devote  himseK  to  the  study  of  his 
own  moods  and  thoughts.  This  change  in 
point  of  view  gained  also  impetus  from  the 
great  revolution  in  philosophy  when,  in  the 
XVIIth  Century,  Descartes  turned  the  world 
inside  out,  and  defined  the  activity  of  con- 


244        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

sciousness,  the  certainty  of  the  thinking  self, 
as  the  most  immediate  fact  of  existence. 

But  all  these  and  many  other  influences 
were  partly  the  cause,  partly  the  symptoms, 
of  this  shifting  of  thought  to  a  new  centre. 
Our  object  is  to  consider  it  for  a  moment,  not 
in  its  ultimate  sources,  but  in  its  growth 
and  diffusion  in  English  life,  as  shown  by  the 
English  language.  This  can  be  well  seen  in 
the  history  of  the  word  conscious  and  its 
derivatives.  Conscious  was  borrowed  from 
the  Latin  poets  in  the  time  of  Shakespeare, 
with  the  sense  of  sharing  knowledge  with 
another,  and  was  used  of  inanimate  things, 
as  Milton's  conscious  night.  The  word  is 
first  found  in  Ben  Jonson's  Poetaster ,  who  ridi- 
cules it  as  a  modem  and  affected  term.  It 
was  used  by  Locke  of  thoughts  and  feelings, 
and  finds  its  full  extension  and  definition 
early  in  the  XVIHth  Century,  when  we  read 
of  "conscious  beings."  Consciousness,  first 
found  in  1632,  attained  its  philosophical 
definition  late  in  the  XVIIth  Century,  when 
it  was  described  by  Locke  as  "perception  of 
what  passes  in  a  man's  own  mind."  To 
Locke  also  we  owe  the  use  of  the  compound 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   245 

self-consciousness  (then  recently  formed)  in 
its  modem  sense;  and  at  about  this  time  the 
old  word  subjective  shifted  its  meaning  from 
the  scholastic  sense  of  "existing  in  itself" 
and  took  on  the  meaning  of  "existing  in 
consciousness  or  thought."  Self-knowledge, 
self-examination,  self-pity,  and  self-contempt 
belong  to  the  "self"  words  of  the  XVIIth 
Century,  and  with  them  appear  a  swarm  of 
what  we  may  call  "introspective"  words — 
words  that  describe  moods  and  feelings,  as 
seen  from  within,  as  part  of  our  own  inner 
experience.  The  older  kind  of  names  for 
human  passions  and  feelings  we  may  call 
"objective,"  that  is  to  say,  they  are  observed 
from  outside,  and  named  by  their  effects  and 
moral  consequences.  These  names  are  apt 
to  be  moral  labels,  stuck  on  dangerous 
tendencies,  to  warn  us  of  their  ultimate 
results.  Most  people  must  have  felt  at  one 
time  or  another  the  grotesque  incongruity 
of  ugly  names  like  greed  or  malice  for  f eehngs 
delightful  at  the  moment;  and  a  non-human 
observer  from  another  planet  might  be 
puzzled  to  find  that  the  passions  and  pro- 
pensities that  were  called  by  the  least  at- 


246        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

tractive  terms  were  the  ones  that  mankind 
most  persistently  indulged. 

The  more  modern  and  "sympathetic" 
names  for  human  feelings,  derived  from  in- 
trospection and  self-analysis,  only  begin  to 
appear  in  large  numbers  about  the  middle  of 
the  XVIIth  Century.  Loneliness,  indeed,  and 
disgust  and  lassitude  are  a  little  earlier;  but 
at  this  time  words  like  aversion,  day-dream, 
dissatisfaction,  discomposure,  make  their  ap- 
pearance; depression  is  transferred  from  mate- 
rial objects  to  a  state  of  mind,  and  the  old 
word  reverie,  which  had  first  meant  "joy" 
and  then  "anger,"  acquires  its  modem  and 
introspective  meaning.  This  vocabulary  of 
moods  and  feelings  was  increased  in  the 
XV  111th  Century  by  ennui,  chagrin,  home- 
sickness, diffidence,  apathy,  while  the  older 
words,  excitement,  agitation,  constraint,  em- 
barrassment, disappointment,  come  to  be 
applied  to  inner  experiences.  With  these 
words  we  find  a  curious  class  of  verbs  and 
adjectives  which  describe  not  so  much  the 
objective  qualities  and  activities  of  things  as 
the  effects  they  produce  on  us,  our  own  feel- 
ings and  sensations.    To  divert,  to  enliven,  to 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   247 

entertain,  to  amuse,  to  entrance,  to  fascinate, 
to  disgust,  to  dissatisfy,  with  the  adjectives 
entertaining,  exhilarating,  perplexing,  refresh- 
ing, and  many  others,  are  all  modern  words,  or 
old  words  given  a  new  and  modern  meaning. 
Some  of  them,  indeed,  are  very  recent,  and 
cm*  use  of  the  common  adjectives  amusing 
and  exciting  is  not  fomid  before  the  XlXth 
Century. 

Perhaps  the  most  characteristic  of  all  these 
modern  adjectives  is  the  word  interesting, 
which  is  put  to  so  many  uses  that  we  can 
hardly  imagine  how  life  or  conversation  could 
be  carried  on  without  it.  And  yet  interesting 
is  not  found  before  the  XVIIIth  Century, 
when  it  first  meant  "important,"  and  its 
first  use  with  its  present  meaning  appears, 
characteristically  enough,  in  Sterne's  Senti- 
mental Journey,  published  in  1768.  About 
the  same  time  the  verb  to  bore  appeared;  and 
we  who  are  so  often  bored,  or  interested,  must, 
if  we  wish  to  enter  into  the  state  of  mind  of 
past  ages,  try  to  imagine  a  time  when  people 
thought  more  of  objects  than  of  their  own 
emotions,  and  when,  if  they  were  bored  or 
interested,  would  not  name  their  feeling,  but 


248        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

mention  the  quality  or  object  that  produced 
it.  This  change  is  a  subtle  and  yet  an  impor- 
tant one;  it  is  due  to  our  increased  self- 
consciousness,  and  our  greater  sense  of  the 
importance  of  the  inner  world  of  feeling.  One 
of  the  latest  products  or  by-products  of  this 
change  is  the  modern  habit  of  taking  a  con- 
scious pleasure  in  our  own  emotions.  This 
"sentimental"  attitude  is  well  dated  for  us 
by  the  appearance  of  the  word  sentimental 
itself  about  the  middle  of  the  XVIIIth  Cen- 
tury. It  soon  became  fashionable;  and, 
carried  abroad  by  Sterne's  Sentimental  Jour- 
ney, it  was  borrowed  by  the  French,  and 
translated  by  the  Germans;  thus  showing,  as 
many  other  instances  would  show  (had  we  the 
space  to  give  them),  that  these  changes  of 
language,  thought,  and  feeling  were  not  con- 
fined to  England,  but  belonged  to  a  general 
movement  in  which  the  whole  of  civilized 
Europe  took  part — one  nation  borrowing  from 
the  other  as  new  developments  arose.  The 
contributions  of  England  to  European  civ- 
ilization, as  tested  by  the  English  words  in 
Continental  languages,  bifteck,  'pudding,  grog, 
jockey,  touristy  comfort,  sport,  etc.,  are  not, 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   249 

generally,  of  a  kind  to  cause  much  national 
self -congratulation.  We  may  be  justly  proud, 
however,  of  our  poHtical  terms  parliament, 
bill,  budget,  meeting,  speech,  and  we  can  at 
any  rate  claim  the  "sentimentality"  of 
modern  Europe  as  a  product  of  this  age  of 
XVIIIth  Century  "sensibility"  in  England, 
when  the  words  affecting  and  pathetic  acquired 
their  present  meanings,  and  when  our  ances- 
tors began  to  speak  of  their  feelings  and 
emx)tions. 

Our  account  of  these  developments  of 
modem  thought,  the  growing  sense  of  indi- 
viduality and  seK-consciousness,  has  been 
necessarily  somewhat  hurried.  In  any  study 
of  this  kind  we  must  be  on  our  guard  against 
hasty  generahzations;  and  we  should  test, 
moreover,  the  changes  in  one  country  with 
those  in  the  languages  of  other  countries 
which  share  with  us  in  the  general  civilization 
of  Europe.  We  must  also  guard  against  the 
notion  that  men,  at  any  period,  did  not  pos- 
sess certain  thoughts  and  feelings  because  they 
had  no  words  to  express  them.  The  investi- 
gation of  the  character  of  different  ages  by  the 
study  of  the  words  used  in  them  is  apt. 


260        THE  ENGLISH  LANGUAGE 

unless  it  be  pursued  with  caution,  to  lead  to 
strange  and  often  absurd  conclusions.  It  has 
ever  been  seriously  argued,  from  the  vague- 
ness and  insufficiency  of  his  colour-words,  that 
Homer,  as  well  as  all  his  contemporaries,  was 
colour-bUnd.  But,  as  it  has  been  well  pointed 
out,  "the  fact  that  the  Homeric  Greeks  have 
no  expression  for  'green'  does  not  prove  that 
they  did  not  see  the  colour,  but  that  they  did 
not  want  the  word*';  and  so,  if  the  Eliza- 
bethans had  no  word  for  disappointment  and 
home-sickness,  we  cannot  assume  that  they  did 
not  experience  these  feelings,  but  only  that 
they  were  not  interested  in  expressing  them. 
But  this  difference,  this  change  of  value 
and  interest,  is  a  very  real  and  very  important 
one.  Vague  feelings  and  thoughts  that  lurk, 
dim  and  unexpressed,  in  the  background  of  the 
mind  become  very  different  and  much  more 
important  when  our  attention  is  directed  to 
them  and  they  appear  sharply  defined  in 
consciousness.  The  change  of  thought  from 
one  generation  to  another  does  not  depend 
so  much  on  new  discoveries  as  the  gradual 
shifting,  into  the  centre  of  vision,  of  ideas  and 
feelings  that  had  been  but  dimly  realized 


LANGUAGE  AND  THOUGHT   251 

before.  And  it  is  just  this  shifting  from  the 
background  to  the  centre  of  thought,  that  is 
so  important  and  yet  so  elusive,  which  is 
marked  and  dated  in  the  history  of  language. 
When  anything  becomes  important  to  us  it 
finds  its  name;  and  in  the  history  of  these 
names  in  the  English  language  can  be  traced 
many  changes  in  English  life,  many  develop- 
ments of  thought,  which  would  yield  a  rich 
reward  to  patient  and  careful  study. 


BIBLIOGRAPHY  I 


The  best  introduction  to  the  study  of  the  English  language 
is  The  Making  of  English,  by  Henry  Bradley  (1904).  I  am 
glad  to  express  my  obligations  to  this  admirable  book.  Other 
works  of  a  short  and  general  character  are  TJie  History  of  the 
English  Language,  by  O.  F.  Emerson  (1910);  Words  and  Their 
Ways  in  English  Speech,  by  Greenough  and  Eattredge  (1902) ; 
The  Historical  Stvdy  of  the  Mother  Tongue,  by  H.  C.  Wyld 
(1907),  and  his  shorter  book,  The  Growth  of  English  (1907). 
These  last  two  works  are  mainly  concerned  with  the  history 
of  English  phonetics.  Jesperson's  Progress  in  Language,  vdth 
Special,  Reference  to  English  (1894),  and  his  Growth  and 
Structure  of  the  English  Language  (1905)  give  the  interesting 
appreciations  and  criticisms  of  a  foreign  scholar.  Of  longer 
works.  Sweet's  New  English  Grammar  (1892),  and  Skeat's 
Principles  of  English  Etymology  (1892)  are  indispensable.  For 
the  study  of  language  in  general  Sweet's  History  of  Language 
(Temple  Classics,  1901)  is  an  admirable  introduction;  other 
important  works  are  Whitney's  Language  and  the  Study  of 
Language  (1875),  his  Life  and  Growth  of  Language  (1886); 
Sayce's  Introduction  to  the  Study  of  Languages  (1880);  and 
Paul's  Principles  of  the  History  of  Language,  translated  from 
German  by  H.  A.  Strong  (1888).  With  the  exception  of  Arch- 
bishop Trench's  Uttle  book  On  the  Study  of  Words  (New 
Edition,  1904),  little  has  been  written  in  English  on  the  con- 
nection between  language  and  thought  and  history;  but 
Schrader's  important  work.  The  Prehistoric  Antiquities  of  the 
Aryan  Peoples,  has  been  translated  (1890),  and  is  of  great 
importance  for  the  earliest  period.  Weise's  Language  and 
Character  of  the  Roman  People  has  also  been  translated  from 
German  (1909),  and  gives  a  vivid  picture  of  the  character  of 
the  Romans  as  mirrored  in  their  language.  Two  French  books 
of  a  more  general  character  which  have  been  translated  are 
Darmesteter's  The  Life  of  Words  (1886),  and  Breal's  Semantics 
(1900).  Many  new  facts  about  the  sources  and  histories  of 
English  words  have  been  recently  discovered,  and  the  state- 
253 


S54  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

ments  in  all  save  the  most  modem  books  should  be  checked  by 
reference  to  the  latest  dictionaries,  to  the  new  edition  of  Skeat's 
Etymological  Dictionary  (1910),  to  his  Concise  Etymological  Dic- 
tionary (1901),  and  to  the  Century  Dictionary,  but  above  all  to 
the  great  New  English  or  Oxford  Dictionary,  which  is  now  in 
process  of  publication,  and  which  contains  an  immense  amount 
of  new  information  of  the  greatest  value  for  the  student  of 
English  civilization. 


INDEX 


American  words,  109 
Analysis,  12,  25 
Angel,  151,  156 
Anglo-French,  33 
Anglo-Saxons,  the,  7 
Arabian  words,  167,  181,  199 
Arbitrary  formations,  105 
Aryans,  the,  9,  12S-34 
Astrology,  176 

Back-formations,  97 

Bible,  the  EngUah,  74,  90,  116 

Bless,  141 

Boyle.  R.,  118 

Browne,  Sir  T.,  113 

Burke,  119,  230 

Carlyle,  T.,  122 
Carton,  70,  115 
Celtic  words,  48,  153 
Chancellor,  163 
Chaucer,  65-7,  75 
Christianity,  150,  153,  165 
Church,  150 
Coleridge,  121 
Columbus,  200 
Commercial  terms,  210 
Commonwealth,  the,  204 
Compounds,  81-5 
Coverdale,  115,  196 
Cross,  157 
Crusades,  the,  167 

Danes,  the,  19,  21,  52,  164 

Derivation,  85-96 

Desynonymization,  77 

Devil,  151,  156 

Doublets,  33 

Dutch  words,  191-3,  198,  202 

Eighteenth-century  words,  241 
Elizabethan  English,  72 
Evelyn,  J.,  118 
Evolution,  224 


Fourteenth-century  words,  170-9 
French  language,  the,  32-9,  74,  180 
French  Revolution,  the,  211 

Gender,  grammatical,  14 

Genius,  237 

"Genius  of  the  Language,"  25,  39, 

76,78 
German  language,  the,  8,  16,  56 
Ginger,  159 
Grammar,  11,  22-5 
Greek,  4&-8,  151,  180-2 

History,  terms  of,  227 
"Humours,"  the,  172-4 
Himting  terms,  190 
Hybrid  words,  87-91 

Individtial,  234 
Interesting,  247 
Irish  words,  49,  157 
Its,  23 

Johnson,  Dr.,  107.  119,  209 

Keats,  121 

Latin,  32,  40,  146 

Middle  English,  22,  63 
Midland  Dialect,  the,  64 
Milton,  114,  206-7 

Nineteenth-century      words,      83, 

92-6,  111,  213,  237 
Norman  Conquest,  the,  20,  30,  164 
Norman  French,  32,  34 

Old  English,  8,  10,  20.  22,  30 
Onomatopoeia,  101-4 

Patriotism,  203 
Pepper,  147 
Person,  235 

255 


256  INDEX 

Phonetic  change,  10,  25,  69  Sentimental,  248 

Political  terms,  204,  210  Shakespeare,  76,  107,  114,  213 

Puritan  words,  206  Shortening,  98 

Purity  in  language,  54-62  Silk,  160 

Spanish  words,  198-202 

Reformation,  the,  71, 195,  225,  241  Spelling,  17,  43 

Renaissance,  the,  70,  193,  233  Spenser,  76,  116 
Restoration,  the,  74,  207,  223 

Revival  of  words,  116,  120,  229  Teutonic  languages,  9,  137-43 

Thirteenth-century  words,  166 

Scholasticism,  183-7  Tindale,  115-16,  196 

Science,  terms  of,  123,  219  Travellers'  words,  198-202 

Scott,  Sir  W.,  120,  230  Twelfth-century  words.  165 
Scottish  terms.  120,  123 

Sea  terms,  131,  136,  139,  192,  212  West-Aryan  words,  135 

Sdf,  compounds  of,  236  Word-order,  15 

Self-analysia,  245  Wyclif,  67 


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